You post a marketing job on Upwork and get flooded with proposals from freelancers around the world promising to transform your business. You scroll through portfolios, check star ratings, and pick someone with solid reviews and reasonable rates. They start strong, ask good questions about your business, and deliver quality work that makes you think you’ve finally solved your marketing problem.
Then something shifts, and six months later you’re stuck with someone who’s become marketing dead weight but you’re afraid to fire them because of all of the complications that come with starting over.
Month 1- 2: The Honeymoon Period
Your freelancer invests serious time learning your business, developing strategies, and producing high-quality work that showcases their capabilities. They respond to messages quickly, spell-check their work, and deliver creative that fees fresh and on brand. You start telling others about your marketing breakthrough.
Month 3-4: The Slide Begins
Response times stretch from hours to days. The creative work that initially impressed you starts feeling templated and generic. They stop asking strategic questions and start asking for deadline extensions. When you request changes or adjustments, you get pushback about scope creep and additional fees for work that used to be included.
Month 5-6: Full Complacency Mode
Your urgent requests sit in their queue for weeks while they juggle other clients. Social media posts get recycled from templates they use across their roster. Email campaigns follow the same boring formulas every month. Ad copy becomes variations on themes they’ve already beaten to death. The person who once seemed invested in your success no treats your account like maintenance work.
The Moment You Realize They Suck
It usually hits during a busy period when you need them the most. You send an urgent message about a time-sensitive campaign and get radio silence for three days. Or you discover they’ve been posting the same generic content to your competitors’ accounts. Or they miss a deadline that costs you money and respond with excuses instead of solutions.
Even when you want to fir them, the logistics feel overwhelming. They have all your passwords, access to your ad accounts, and knowledge about what’s worked and what hasn’t. Your email sequences, social media calendars, and advertising strategies live in their heads or on their personal systems.
When you finally pull the trigger, you discover how dependent you’ve become on their institutional knowledge. Which email sequences actually convert prospects? What audiences work best for your Facebook ads? Why did last month’s campaign perform better than this month’s? The answers walked out the door with your freelancer.
You spend days tracking down login credentials for accounts you forgot existed. Some platforms are connected to their personal addresses. Other require verification calls to phone numbers they control. Your advertising accounts need ownership transfers. You find yourself trying to reconstruct months of marketing intelligence from fragments of email threads and incomplete campaign notes. Meanwhile, your marketing sits in limbo.
Back to Upwork, Again
You write essentially the same job posting you wrote eight months ago, hoping this time it will be different. You review candidates who ask the same questions and make the same promises. You pick someone new based on the same criteria that failed you last time, because you don’t know what else to evaluate.
Your new freelancer starts with enthusiasm and attention, produces good work for a few months, then gradually slides into the same complacent patterns that made you fire the predecessor. You realize you’re not hiring marketing solutions, you’re renting temporary attention from people who are optimizing their own efficiency across multiple clients.
Beyond the freelancer fees, you’re paying for constant management time, knowledge transfer sessions, and momentum lost during transitions. You’re buying the same marketing education multiple times as each new freelancer learns your business from scratch. The cheap hourly rate becomes expensive when you factor in all the overhead.
What If Your Marketing Team Worked Within Your Business Instead of Outside of It?
When marketing professionals operate within integrated business systems, they can’t become disconnected from your goals because their tools and processes are built around your specific outcomes. Campaign knowledge stays in your business systems, not in someone’s head. Performance data accumulates over time instead of walking out the door with departing freelancers.
The team handling the marketing sees your sales numbers, understands your customer feedback, and works within processes designed for long-term business growth rather than short-term project completion.
Ready to stop cycling through disappointing freelancers?
Propel3 provides unlimited done-for-you marketing services from a dedicated team that works within your business platform. No more knowledge transfer nightmare, password archeology, or starting over every six months. See how we can help.