The short answer
Most of what an agency does needs nothing from the client. The exception is decision time: approving what the firm claims about itself, and answering the questions only an owner can answer. In a UK professional services firm those hours are front loaded into the first six weeks and they carry the highest charge-out rate in the building. Price them before comparing quotes, because the cheaper fee often carries the larger internal bill.
Key takeaways
- An engagement has two prices: the fee, and the partner hours it needs from the firm. Only one of them appears on the proposal.
- The expensive hours are the ones nobody else at the practice can supply, and they cluster in the first six weeks rather than spreading evenly.
- Divide the gap between two fees by the gap in the partner hours they need. Where the answer is below your charge-out rate, the dearer agency is the cheaper engagement.
- Government's own guidance for buying digital work names one owner on the buying side with the authority to decide, and budgets the contact hours rather than assuming them.
- Where the partner hours cannot be found for the first six weeks, the engagement should wait for the quarter after.
Ask an agency how much of your time the work will take and the answer usually comes back as one to two hours a week. Search the question and almost every result is published by an agency or a marketing vendor, answering it about themselves.
The figure is not so much wrong as pointed at the wrong thing. An hour of an office manager's time and an hour of a managing partner's are not the same hour, and an engagement does not need them in the same proportion. What it needs from a practice is decisions: what the firm will claim about itself, and whether a page can go live. Those hours cannot be substituted, and they arrive in a rush at the start. In a UK accountancy practice they are billed at the highest rate on the payroll.
So the question worth asking before the engagement letter is signed is not how many hours. It is how many partner hours, and when.
The hours that cost you are the ones only a partner can supply
An engagement asks the firm for two kinds of time: administrative time, which almost anyone can give, and decision time, which only somebody with authority can. The proposal prices neither, and the two are not interchangeable.
The largest UK buyer of digital work that publishes what it expects of itself is the state, which makes its guidance unusually useful here because it is written by a buyer rather than by a supplier. The capability framework for a service owner puts the authority to make the business and technical decisions about a service with one named person on the buying side, not with whoever is delivering it. The Cabinet Office Sourcing Playbook goes further and gives contract management and supplier relationships chapters of their own, as work the buyer resources.
Neither document governs a private practice. The transferable part is the structure: the buying side of a project has a job with named hours in it. In a firm of 10 to 50 people that job has no title, and it lands on a partner.
What the first quarter actually asks of a partner
The decision hours are front loaded, and most of them are spent before anything the agency produces is visible. That is the opposite shape to the fee, which arrives in equal monthly instalments, and it is why the engagement feels heaviest in the month the firm has least to show for it.
Scope and positioning Weeks 1 to 2
What the practice wants more of, and what it will not say about itself.
4 hrstotal 4
Approval routing Week 2
Who signs off what, and what happens while that person is away.
2 hrstotal 6
First claims and copy review Weeks 3 to 6
Every factual statement about the practice, against the evidence the firm holds for it.
7 hrstotal 13
Subject matter input Weeks 3 to 10
The answers that make the work specific to this practice rather than to the sector.
6 hrstotal 19
Monthly review, three of them Months 1 to 3
Reading the report and deciding what changes as a result of it.
3 hrstotal 22
Rework and escalation Unscheduled
The round nobody plans for, which happens on most first quarters.
3 hrstotal 25
Priced at a partner rate of £180 an hour
An internal cost that appears on no invoice and in no proposal.
£4,50025 hrs
Why the cheaper quote is often the more expensive engagement
Divide the gap between two fees by the gap in the partner hours they need. Where the answer is less than your charge-out rate, the dearer quote is the cheaper engagement.
Take two proposals for the same job. One quotes £1,800 a month and needs eight hours of partner time a month to run. The other quotes £2,600 and needs three. The fee gap is £800 and the hours gap is five. £800 divided by five is £160 an hour, and above that rate the expensive proposal is the cheaper one.
| Your charge-out rate | £1,800 fee, 8 partner hours | £2,600 fee, 3 partner hours | Cheaper in total |
|---|---|---|---|
| £90 | £2,520 | £2,870 | The £1,800 quote, by £350 |
| £160 | £3,080 | £3,080 | Neither. This is the crossover |
| £220 | £3,560 | £3,260 | The £2,600 quote, by £300 |
| £300 | £4,200 | £3,500 | The £2,600 quote, by £700 |
Which makes the hours figure worth asking for on the call, before either quote is compared on price. Two questions get it out: how many hours of our people's time did your last comparable engagement need in its first month, and who did it need them from. An agency that has run the work before can answer both without checking. The answer then belongs in the scope document, alongside everything else that should be in writing before an agency starts work.
The hours no proposal mentions
The contact time a buyer is asked for is not a meeting, and the published figure for it comes from the buying side rather than from a supplier. The Government Digital Service asks everyone on a service team to spend at least two hours every six weeks watching real users. A UK practice buying marketing is not a government team building a service. The transferable part is that somebody sat down and budgeted the buyer's contact hours instead of assuming them.
Two things reduce the total, and the fee is neither. The first is a decision the firm makes once: a written statement of what the practice will and will not claim, which turns copy review from a debate about positioning into a check against a document. It is the same file that matters when the advertising has to be defended to a regulator. The second is one named approver with real authority, so nothing waits for the next partners' meeting.
What does not reduce it is hiring a larger agency. More people on the supplier side usually means more questions arriving in parallel, and the questions still land on the same partner.
Before the engagement letter
Not sure whether the firm has the hours this needs right now?
Free to your firm. The agency pays us, and only if the relationship works, which is why we would rather tell you to start in January than introduce somebody your practice has no time to instruct.
Get a recommendationWhen a firm should not start an engagement yet
Where the partner who has to approve the work cannot clear roughly two hours a week for the first six weeks, the engagement should wait. Starting anyway produces the worst available version of it. The agency works to assumptions because nobody was free to correct them, and the firm pays for the same quarter twice.
A practice heading into its busiest filing weeks is not short of an agency, it is short of a decision maker.
The other case for waiting is arithmetical. Where the honest figure for partner hours is high enough to change the answer, the comparison worth running is not between two agencies at all, it is between an agency and a hire. Partners who would rather test the timing before appointing anybody can see what we assess before recommending an agency.
Frequently asked questions
What partners ask once the fee is agreed.
How many hours a week should we expect to spend on a marketing agency?
Plan by phase rather than by week. The scoping and approval work lands in the first six weeks and needs whoever can settle what the firm will claim about itself. After that the standing commitment is a monthly review plus the approvals the work generates, which is a smaller number of hours and a lower grade of time.
Can we hand the agency relationship to an office manager?
The administrative half, yes. The decisions about what the practice claims and which clients it wants more of cannot go downward, because they come straight back up. What stops the work stalling is one person with the authority to approve, and in a firm of this size that is usually an owner.
Does a bigger retainer mean less work for us?
Not reliably. A larger programme produces more output to approve and more questions to answer, and both arrive at the same partner.
How do we compare two agency quotes that need different amounts of our time?
Divide the difference between the two fees by the difference in the partner hours each one needs. The answer is an hourly rate. Where your own charge-out rate is higher than that figure, the more expensive quote is the cheaper engagement once your time is counted.
Should we be recording the time an engagement takes?
Most UK practices already have the mechanism, because they record time against clients. Booking agency hours to an internal code for the first quarter turns next year's argument about whether the engagement was worth it into arithmetic.
Sources and useful reading
- Government Digital and Data capability framework, service owner, for the decision authority sitting with one named person on the buying side.
- The Sourcing Playbook, Cabinet Office, for contract management and supplier relationships treated as resourced buyer-side work.
- Government Digital Service, two hours every six weeks, for a published figure for a buying team's contact hours.
This article is commercial decision support and is not legal or accounting advice. The two modules are arithmetic on illustrative figures, labelled as such, and no hours figure here is a measured market average or a survey result. The three sources above were located on 29 September 2026 and describe public sector practice, which is cited as a buyer's published position rather than as a rule binding any private firm. Nothing here describes the terms or conduct of any named agency.