You closed your Series A, maybe your Series B. The product works. Users love it. Revenue climbs, but not fast enough for the board. The next raise hangs on one word: momentum. Suddenly you realize the story around your product is as important as the product itself. That’s when the hunt for a creative agency begins.

Pick the right partner and your category narrative lands with investors, prospects, and future hires in one clean shot. Pick the wrong one and you bleed six months of runway explaining to a “full-service” shop why an enterprise buyer cares about time-to-value, not TikTok dances. I’ve watched both outcomes play out. One path funds growth; the other funds competitors.

Reality Check for Series A-C Tech Founders

Fast-growing tech companies all hit the same wall. Processes buckle, communication frays, and the founder who used to write every line of copy can’t even finish a Slack thread. At the exact moment you need leverage, you also need specialists who can translate complex value props into language a CFO, a CTO, and a procurement officer can all agree on. That is brand in action - clear, repeatable, irresistible.

A brand upgrade also fuels hiring. Remember that 83% of job seekers research employer reviews before they even decide where to apply. If your site and socials feel dated, the senior engineer you need in Q3 will keep scrolling.

Runway, pipeline, talent - three levers, one decision. That’s why finding a great agency is a strategic call, not a marketing errand.

9 Red Flags That Should Make You Walk Away

Every agency sounds brilliant in a pitch deck. The trick is spotting danger signs before the SOW is inked. I’ve boiled the pitfalls down to nine red flags. Hit more than two, and you’re better off lighting the budget on fire - at least the flames provide warmth.

Red Flag 1: They Talk About Social Likes, Not Revenue

Ask how they measure success. If the first words out of their mouth are impressions, followers, or “share of voice,” stop the meeting. Growth-stage founders buy shorter sales cycles and higher win rates. Period. A serious agency opens with questions about ARR targets, pipeline velocity, and LTV:CAC ratios. Everything else is decoration.

Red Flag 2: Awards Trump Business Wins

A wall of trophies looks cool, but awards rarely keep churn below 5%. When an agency can’t tie creative work to real metrics - faster closes, bigger contracts, higher valuations - you’re staring at style over substance. Ask for a client reference who can tell you how revenue moved, not how pretty the homepage looked.

Red Flag 3: They’re Generalists in a Specialist Market

Deep-tech marketing is not a “vertical” you dabble in between liquor brands and sneaker drops. Quantum buyers speak a different language than med-tech founders, who speak a different language than AI security officers. If last quarter’s work ranged from cupcakes to crypto, the shop lacks the focus you need. Look for case studies inside B2B tech: robotics deployments, data-platform launches, regulated clinical devices.

Red Flag 4: They Treat Brand as a One-Time Project

A brand isn’t a logo file - it’s a living system. Messaging will morph as the product roadmap evolves and as funding rounds spark new audiences. When an agency promises to “finish the brand in sixty days,” they’re selling a wall poster, not a growth engine. Demand a roadmap that includes content iterations, sales-enablement refreshes, and quarterly positioning audits.

Red Flag 5: They Love the Big Reveal

Mad-Men-style unveilings look dramatic on television. In real life, a splashy presentation that bypasses customer feedback lands with a thud. The strongest creative work is co-created with you, your sales floor, and even a few beta customers. If an agency can’t show you user-testing checkpoints and iterative prototypes, expect expensive re-work.

Red Flag 6: They Ignore Your GTM Stack

Your funnel runs through HubSpot, Outreach, LinkedIn Ads, and yes, the dreaded procurement portal. Creative that doesn’t plug into those pipes is a stranded asset. When you ask how they pair brand storytelling with RevOps data and they blink, cut the call short. The right partner will request API access on day one because the handoff between creative and revenue ops makes or breaks ROI.

Red Flag 7: The Senior Team Sells, Interns Deliver

You meet the rainmaker in the pitch. Three weeks later, your Slack channel fills with junior designers looking for direction. That bait-and-switch wastes runway and patience. A reputable agency identifies the people who will live on your business: strategist, writer, designer, account lead. Names, calendars, and KPIs are all on the table before you sign.

Red Flag 8: Virality Is the Strategy

You sell productivity gains to a risk-averse buying committee. Going viral on TikTok might boost brand awareness, but it rarely moves an enterprise deal. If an agency’s master plan hinges on social buzz without a path to decision-maker value, keep searching. Durable growth comes from thought-leadership content, targeted ABM plays, and crystal-clear positioning.

Red Flag 9: Aesthetic Drives the Process, Not Strategy

Pretty is easy to admire; strategy is hard to fake. When the kickoff dives into fonts before customer insights, you’re decorating a house without blueprints. Real process starts with research. Stakeholder interviews, competitive tear-downs, and win-loss analysis guide every design choice. Skip this step and the brand won’t hold under pressure.

Turning the Search Into a Repeatable Process

Founders often crowd-source agency names in a Slack channel and pray. There’s a better way - one that removes luck from the equation and pushes each contender to show real thinking.

First, translate the problem into numbers. “We need a rebrand” means nothing. “We need to cut our sales cycle from 120 days to 90 by Q4” is an engineering spec for marketers. With targets in hand, build a shortlist. The best source is adjacent success. Which agency helped a Series B robotics firm land Gartner coverage? Which shop positioned a data-ops platform as a category leader before its Series C? Ask investors, portfolio CEOs, and sales-ops leaders for names. Patterns will emerge.

Next, run what I call a no-deck call. Force every agency to talk without slides for thirty minutes. You’ll see the depth of their thinking when there’s nothing to read from. Ask how they balance founder vision with buyer skepticism, how they tie creative to Net Revenue Retention, and how they approach technical validation. Weak partners fold here.

When you’d hire a senior engineer, you trial them on a small project. Do the same with agencies. Hand over a public asset - a landing page, a webinar recording, even a LinkedIn post. Ask for a concise teardown: what’s broken, how they’d fix it, and one thing they would launch within thirty days. You’re not fishing for free work; you’re stress-testing intellect, speed, and chemistry.

Finally, insist on a mutual sprint before a long retainer. At Fello we call it a Rapid Validation Sprint. In thirty days we lock the positioning, write a flagship narrative, create a short hero video, and drop a landing page tied to real ads. Both sides learn if the partnership feels fluid or forced. If it clicks, we sign the annual plan. If not, no hard feelings and no sunk-cost spiral.

Five Questions That Separate Pretenders from Partners

Some founders glaze over in RFP meetings because every answer sounds identical. Use sharper questions.

Ask them to walk you through the last SaaS engagement where creative moved pipeline. If they talk only about impressions, that’s a miss. If they cite demo-to-close rates, you’re on the right track.

Request an example of a campaign they killed and why. An honest failure study shows maturity. Then press on enablement: how do they hand fresh brand guidelines to a sales team so those guidelines actually get used?

Finally, ask what a bad fit looks like for them. A clear answer means they value match over billings.

Notice what you didn’t hear: buzzwords, vanity metrics, or hand-waving about “going big on social.” That silence is golden.

Signs You’ve Found the Right Partner

You’ll feel traction in the first month. The agency won’t ask “What do you want to say?” They’ll ask, “What do your buyers need to hear to fund this initiative?” You’ll see frameworks, not mood boards - messaging pyramids, buyer-journey maps, content cadences. The language they write makes your own head nod because it finally captures what you’ve been trying to explain since seed stage. Your SDRs memorize the new pitch because it’s shorter, clearer, and lands harder. A big Sixteen-Series-B investor compliments the deck on slide three. You know you’re onto something.

Internally, teams start using the brand naturally. Nobody forces them. The design files live in Figma; the copy lives in Notion; enablement videos live in Gong. Sales grabs an updated one-pager for Tuesday’s call without pestering product marketing. That’s cultural adoption, and it’s the difference between lipstick and transformation.

How to Build Your Own Agency Scorecard

I’m not a fan of RFP spreadsheets, but I am a fan of clarity.

Rate every finalist on seven criteria: tech-domain experience, revenue alignment, senior-team access, strategic depth, cultural fit, integration with your GTM stack, and raw creative chops.

Assign weights that match your pain points. If pipeline is bleeding, revenue alignment and GTM integration get heavy weights. If you operate in a complex regulatory space, domain depth ranks highest.

Average the numbers and your gut feelings. Data informs; intuition decides.

The Money Question: What Should You Spend?

Founders whisper about cost like it’s a state secret. I’ll say the quiet part out loud. Allocate five to 8% of the ARR target you want to hit in the next 15 months. Chasing a $20 million run rate? A million-plus spent on brand and creative is rational if it shaves six months off time to that run rate and sets you up for a premium Series C valuation.

Agency spend isn’t a line item. It’s the price of compressing time between milestones.

Founder Mindset: From Doer-in-Chief to Orchestrator-in-Chief

Handing off the company voice is scary. You spent years crafting the story. Now strangers want the keyboard. The best founders keep the vision but delegate execution, the same way a CTO delegates cloud architecture. Your role shifts from writing every headline to protecting the North Star and testing external output against it. The faster you embrace that shift, the faster your brand scales with - or ahead of - revenue.

Closing Thought

Markets forget features; they remember feelings. The right creative agency makes buyers feel that your solution is the only safe bet, investors feel the upside before due diligence, and future employees feel the pull of a mission worth their talent.

Spot the red flags early, guard your runway, and partner with people who understand that brand is a revenue strategy. If that partner happens to be Fello, my calendar is open. If it’s someone else, that’s fine too. Just promise me you won’t settle for an agency that calls your AI platform “an app.”

Your category is still up for grabs. Claim it before someone else paints the sky your color.