It was 38 degrees outside and my house felt like a storage unit. I did what anyone would do — cranked the air conditioner to 16, jammed the fan to max, and stood in front of the vent like it owed me money.
Forty minutes later, the house was still warm. The unit was screaming. I was sweating through a shirt I’d already changed once.
I did this for an entire summer. Every hot day, same routine. Crank it to 16. Max fan. Stand there wondering why a ducted system — covering every room in the house, more than enough capacity on paper — couldn’t do its one job. This wasn’t some cheap portable unit. It was a serious system with serious power. And it was barely cooling the hallway.
Then one afternoon — I don’t even remember why — I just didn’t push it. Set it to 18 instead of 16. Dropped the fan to low. Maybe I was tired of the noise. Maybe I’d given up trying to force it. I walked away and forgot about it.
Half an hour later, the house was cool.
Not slightly cool. Properly cool. The kind of cool where the unit barely hums and you forget it’s running. Same machine. Same house. Same brutal Sydney afternoon. Half the effort, twice the result.
I wish I could tell you I understood immediately. I didn’t. It took a few more weeks of accidentally leaving it on the lower setting, noticing the house cooled faster each time, before the pattern became impossible to ignore. The realisation didn’t arrive like a lightning bolt. It crept up like a slow tide.
And when it finally landed — really landed — it hit somewhere deeper than the thermostat. The air conditioner wasn’t weaker at 18 degrees. It was better tuned. The difference between a cool house and a warm one wasn’t more power. It was understanding how the system actually worked.
Lincoln supposedly said he’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe if given six hours to fell a tree. Every business owner I know would spend all six hours swinging. And then complain about the axe.
I’d been watching it happen in marketing for years — business owners and their agencies grinding harder on execution, adding more channels, more vendors, more spend, never stopping long enough to learn how the machine underneath actually works. Never tuning the dials. Just cranking them all to max and wondering why the house won’t cool.
The compressor problem nobody talks about
Here’s what’s actually happening inside your AC when you set it to 16 and crank the fan.
The compressor — the engine that creates cold air — kicks on at full power. It works furiously for a few minutes. Then the system’s safety mechanism detects it’s overworking and shuts it off. The temperature barely drops. So it kicks on again. Shuts off again. On. Off. On. Off.
HVAC engineers call this “short-cycling.” The compressor never reaches a steady state — that efficient cruising altitude where it’s doing consistent work without burning itself out. Every restart costs more energy than sustained running. Every shutdown loses the momentum it just built.
You’ve felt this. You’ve stood in front of the vent, felt cold air blast for thirty seconds, then… nothing. Then cold again. Then nothing. The house never gets comfortable because the system is fighting itself.
At 18 degrees and low fan, the compressor reaches steady state quickly. It runs continuously at a manageable load. The air circulates evenly. No drama. No short-cycling. Just consistent cooling that compounds over time.
Your marketing has the same problem
You’re a business owner spending $8K, $12K, maybe $20K a month across marketing. You’ve got a Google Ads person. A separate Facebook agency. Someone doing your email. A freelancer handling landing pages. Maybe a LinkedIn specialist who charges by the hour.
Every single one of them is short-cycling.
Your Google Ads person bids aggressively on keywords. Meanwhile your Facebook agency is targeting the same audience with different messaging, different offers, and no idea what the Google campaign is saying. Your email team sends follow-ups that reference a promotion your ad people never told them about. Your landing page doesn’t match the creative your ad agency approved last Tuesday.
So what happens? Each agency works in bursts. They push hard, hit a wall they can’t see (because the wall is another agency’s conflicting work), pull back, regroup, push again. On. Off. On. Off.
The compressor never reaches steady state.
You’re paying five agencies to fight each other. And the worst part — the truly expensive part — is that you are the only integration layer. You’re the one on the Friday afternoon call explaining to the Google team what the Facebook team is doing. You’re the one forwarding emails between people who should be looking at the same dashboard but aren’t.
That’s not marketing management. That’s air traffic control with a walkie-talkie.
The consensus is wrong
The prevailing wisdom goes like this: specialists outperform generalists. You want the best Google Ads person, the best Facebook buyer, the best email strategist. Each one focused entirely on their channel. Maximum expertise per dollar.
This logic makes intuitive sense. It’s how we hire surgeons — you want the knee specialist, not the general practitioner, cutting your ACL. And for years, I watched business owners build their marketing teams this way. Stack specialists. More expertise. More coverage. More is more.
The problem isn’t the expertise. Every one of those specialists might be excellent at their individual job. Your Google Ads person probably is good at Google Ads. Your Facebook agency probably does know the platform inside out.
The problem is the spaces between them.
Nobody owns the spaces. Nobody is responsible for making sure the Google bid strategy doesn’t cannibalise the Facebook retargeting pool. Nobody ensures the email sequence reflects what the ads are actually promising this week. Nobody notices when the landing page conversion rate drops because it was optimised for last month’s campaign that ended three Tuesdays ago.
Each specialist optimises their compressor. Nobody optimises the system.
And here’s the part that keeps me up at night: the specialists don’t even know the system is short-cycling. They see their own channel metrics. Their own dashboards. Their own isolated slice of performance. From where they sit, they’re doing good work. And they might be right — in isolation.
But marketing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in a house with one thermostat.
"But one person can't replace five specialists"
This is the moment you push back. I’ve heard it hundreds of times.
One person managing everything? That sounds like a downgrade. I’d rather have dedicated experts on each channel than one person spread thin across all of them.
And honestly? If we were talking about 2015, you’d be right. One human physically could not match the output of five dedicated specialists running five separate platforms. The knowledge gap was too wide. The execution load was too heavy. The tools weren’t there.
That constraint dissolved.
What changed isn’t some vague “AI revolution.” What changed is specific: the execution burden that required five separate people — the media buying, the creative production, the data analysis, the campaign builds — can now be handled by one strategic brain directing AI-powered systems. Not autopilot. Not “set and forget.” One person making every decision, with tools that execute at the speed and scale that used to require a team.
The strategist isn’t spread thin. They’re the thermostat.
Think about it. The reason your AC works beautifully at 18 degrees and low fan isn’t because the compressor is less powerful. It’s because the system is calibrated. One thermostat reads the room, decides what’s needed, and directs the compressor accordingly. It doesn’t need five thermostats arguing about the temperature.
When one brain owns the strategy, the media buying, the messaging, the landing pages, and the data — the compressor stops short-cycling. Google Ads and Facebook aren’t competing for the same audience because the same person is allocating the budget. Email sequences match the ads because the same person wrote both. Landing pages convert because the same person who designed the funnel is reading the analytics.
Steady state. Consistent cooling. The system hums.
Where the consensus still holds
I’m not going to pretend this works for everyone. That would make me the kind of marketer I’m telling you to fire.
If you’re spending $500K a month on paid media across twelve countries, you need specialist teams. At that scale, the coordination overhead is worth it because the execution complexity demands dedicated humans on each platform, in each market, monitoring around the clock.
If you’re in a regulated industry — finance, pharma, medical devices — where a single ad copy mistake triggers a compliance violation, you may need specialists who live and breathe that regulatory environment for each specific channel.
And if you’ve already built an internal marketing team of four or five people who sit in the same room, share the same dashboards, and meet every morning — you’ve already solved the short-cycling problem with headcount. The agencies-as-compressors model doesn’t apply because your people are the integrated system.
But if you’re a business owner spending $5K to $50K a month across three to six marketing channels, managed by three to six different agencies or freelancers who never talk to each other?
You’re running at 16 degrees and max fan. And the house is still warm.
The math behind the hum
Let’s get concrete.
A typical multi-agency setup for a mid-sized business looks like this: Google Ads agency ($1,500–$3,000/month), Facebook/Meta agency ($1,500–$2,500), email marketing ($800–$1,500), SEO consultant ($1,000–$2,000), landing page designer or CRO freelancer ($500–$1,500). That’s $5,300 to $12,500 in management fees alone — before a single dollar of ad spend.
Now add the hidden costs. Your time coordinating — conservatively 5–8 hours per week at whatever your hourly rate is. The attribution waste when agencies claim the same conversion. The budget inefficiency when channels compete instead of complement. The speed tax when a campaign change requires three separate email chains and two weeks of back-and-forth.
It adds up fast. And none of it shows on an invoice.
One integrated operator replaces that entire stack. Not with less capability — with connected capability. The Google Ads don’t just run alongside the Facebook ads. They’re sequenced. The retargeting pools are shared. The messaging escalates in a designed order. The landing page is built by the same person who wrote the ad that drives traffic to it.
Short-cycling stops. Steady state begins. The compressor hums.
And the $6,000 to $8,000 you just saved on agency fragmentation? That goes back into ad spend — where it actually generates revenue instead of funding coordination overhead.
What 18 degrees feels like
On a Monday morning, you open one dashboard. Everything is there — paid media performance, email metrics, funnel conversion rates, attribution data. Not because five agencies sent five separate reports you need to cross-reference. Because one strategist spent the time learning how every piece connects — and built the system accordingly.
That time investment is the axe-sharpening most businesses skip. While your competitors are adding another agency, another channel, another tool to the pile, an integrated operator is studying the machine. Learning which dials matter. Understanding how a Google Ads bid change ripples through to email open rates three weeks later. Mapping the whole system, not just the individual parts.
This isn’t less work. It’s differently allocated work. Less grinding on disconnected tasks, more time understanding why those tasks exist and how they compound.
When something breaks — and something always breaks — the response time isn’t “let me check with our team and get back to you next week.” It’s immediate, because the person who spotted the problem is the same person who built the system, understands the relationships between the parts, and knows which dial to turn. No handoffs. No finger-pointing. No compressor cycling on and off while everyone debates whose fault it is.
It’s late afternoon now. The sun has shifted off the windows and the house is comfortable. The air conditioner is so quiet I actually check to make sure it’s still running. It is. Low fan. 18 degrees. Barely working. Doing more than it ever did at 16 and max blast.
The compressor isn’t straining. It’s cruising.
I spent an entire summer forcing that machine before the pattern crept up on me. An entire summer of noise and sweat and a house that never quite cooled down. Not because the system was broken — because I kept pushing it past the point where it could function.
I think about the business owner I spoke with last week — six agencies, $14K a month in management fees, and a Slack channel with 47 unread messages from vendors who don’t know what the other vendors are doing. He told me he felt like he was “managing a daycare for marketers.” He’d been doing it for three years. Same routine. More agencies, more spend, more noise, same warm house.
I told him about the air conditioner. The recognition on his face was instant — faster than mine ever was.
He booked the audit before I finished the analogy.
The question isn’t whether your marketing system is short-cycling. If you’re paying multiple disconnected agencies, it is. The question is how many more summers you keep swinging a dull axe — adding agencies, adding spend, adding noise — instead of stopping long enough to learn how the machine actually works.
Set it to 18. Lower the fan. Sharpen the axe. Let the system reach steady state.
You’ll be surprised how quiet profitable marketing sounds.
Find Out What Your Agencies Are Costing You
Book a free Agency Waste Audit and I’ll map your current multi-agency setup against the integrated model — showing you exactly where the gaps, overlaps, and wasted spend are hiding.
Most clients find 2–3 channels bidding against each other that nobody spotted — because nobody could see the whole thermostat. Takes 30 minutes.
You don’t need more agencies. You need to stop being the only one holding the system together.