About
I hired six agencies
before I built this one.
Yancey’s Marketing Agency is a veteran-owned marketing company headquartered in Tampa Bay. It was founded by Les Yancey, who spent years on the other side of this transaction — as the customer, writing the checks, and getting very little back.
How it started
Three months, thousands of dollars, nothing to show for it.
Every one of the six agencies sounded great on the call and told me exactly what I wanted to hear. I was paying them, and running paid ads the whole time. At the end of it I had nothing worth having — no leads I could close, and no straight answer about what had been done with the money.
What made me angriest wasn’t the money. It was never being listened to. They supposedly knew better than me, but I’m the owner. When the message is wrong, the qualifying isn’t in place, and my calendar is full of no-shows and people who can’t afford what I sell — that’s a problem. Every time I raised it, I was told the platform had to “learn my business” first.
Then I hired four website companies. At the end of that, I found out I didn’t even own the website I’d paid for.
So I built the tool I needed. Not to sell — for me, to run my own business with. It took the sixteen-hour days I’d been trying to avoid, learning every piece of it from the ground up while still running the company that needed the marketing. Somewhere in there I realized I wasn’t the only one this had happened to. That’s when it became an agency.
— Les Yancey, Founder
Who you actually work with
Your work stays in-house. So does the person handling it.
Every piece of work we deliver is produced in-house. Nothing is subcontracted to another agency, run through a white-label shop, or handed to overseas contractors billing by the hour. That is worth saying out loud because it is not the norm — a great deal of what gets sold as agency work is bought wholesale somewhere else and marked up, and the client is never told.
The person you meet on your first call is the person you deal with after that. Not just through onboarding, not just for the first ninety days — for as long as you’re a client. No account-manager rotation. No reassignment to whoever has room this quarter. No email introducing you to your new point of contact because the last one moved on.
The usual complaint about agencies is the bait-and-switch: you meet the principals at the pitch, you sign, and then a junior coordinator sends you screenshots for eighteen months. There is no version of that here. There is no bench to hand you off to, and nobody sitting between you and the person accountable for what gets delivered. Les scopes the work and stands behind it. If something goes out that shouldn’t have, that is his to answer for.
The software is what makes that workable. Yancey’s Marketing Agency runs on a platform Les built and still builds — the same system clients use to watch their own work happen. He isn’t reselling somebody else’s dashboard with a logo on it. When a client needs something the system doesn’t do yet, the person they’re asking is the person who writes it.
Background
Navy first, then this.
Veteran-owned
Les is a disabled Navy veteran. The agency is veteran-owned and operated, headquartered in Tampa Bay, Florida.
Builder, not reseller
The platform the agency runs on was built by the founder for his own business, before it was ever offered to a client.
What we hold to
Four commitments, written down.
Honesty, transparency, hardwork, dedication. They’re on the home page in full, with what each one actually obligates us to do — not as values on a wall, but as things a client can hold us to. The one that costs us most is transparency: every client sees the same analytics we do, in real time, including the numbers that make us look bad.
Most agencies keep a monthly reporting cycle precisely because it lets them choose what you find out and when. We gave that up on purpose. When something isn’t working, our client sees it before we’ve finished fixing it.
What you don’t need us for
Honestly? You could learn all of it.
There is nothing we do that an owner couldn’t learn. No secret knowledge, no credential you can’t get. What you’d have to do is learn it from the ground up and then work a second job on top of the business you’re already trying to sell. That’s not a hypothetical — it’s exactly what the founder did, and it’s why the agency exists.
So the honest pitch isn’t that this is impossible without us. It’s that you shouldn’t have to run two careers to have one business.
The next step
If you’ve been burned before, we’d still want the conversation.
Thirty minutes. We learn the business and the numbers, and you find out whether we’re the right people for the work. If we aren’t, you’ll hear that on the call.