The requests we decline, and why taking them would cost the agency more than the revenue is worth.
A delivery partner who never says no is not being accommodating. They are taking work they cannot do well and betting you will not notice until it is your reputation on the line.
Some channels do not function below a spend level. Programmatic needs volume before the optimization has anything to work with; paid search below a few thousand a month cannot gather enough conversion data for automated bidding to beat manual.
Taking that budget produces a report full of noise and a client who concludes the channel does not work.
A campaign built in two days to hit a client’s arbitrary launch date will underperform, and the underperformance will be attributed to the channel rather than the rush.
The honest answer is a later launch date or a deliberately reduced scope that can be done properly.
This is the hardest one. Sometimes an account is unhappy because the wrong thing was sold — an outcome promised that the budget cannot buy. No amount of delivery quality resolves that, and attempting it burns months.
The useful move is to name it early, as a scoping conversation rather than a performance one.
Guaranteed rankings. Guaranteed lead volume. A ROAS number promised before anyone has seen the account. Declining these costs revenue and protects something worth more.
Send the shape of what you are carrying — how many accounts, which channels, where it hurts. We will come back with specifics.