I met Alexander Larsson at the SEO Vibes conference in Zakopane in 2025. He runs Memorise, a growth network out of Gothenburg. Shortly after the conference I listened to a podcast with him and the episode had a title that was hard to ignore: “Senior specialists don’t do the work.“
This is nothing new to me, we have discussed it many times at our coffee table when I worked at an agency. But what stuck with me is someone saying it out loud, because it names something most of us in this industry have watched from the inside but rarely say out loud to a client’s face. I don’t think it should be the way that a senior specialist just presents the work that a junior did, so I asked him to put it in writing — and to bring the arithmetic, not just the opinion. This is what we landed on.
This article is written by Katarina Dahlin together with Alexander Larsson.
The bait, and the switch
The person who walks into your pitch is senior, sharp, and convincing. Fifteen years of scars, a portfolio that closes the deal, an answer for every objection. You sign because of them.
Then the contract is signed, the kickoff happens, and somewhere between week two and week six the work quietly slides down the org chart. The senior who sold you moves on to the next pitch. A junior — or three — inherit your account.
Nobody announces it. There’s no email that says “your strategist has left the building.” You just notice the answers get slower, vaguer, more templated. You’re talking to a coordinator or project manager who relays your questions to someone you never meet.
This isn’t fraud. It’s arithmetic. And once you see the arithmetic, you can’t unsee it.
The floor
Here’s the thing almost nobody tells clients: marketing hours have a floor, and below it the result isn’t smaller. It’s zero.
Take your monthly fee. Divide it by what a senior hour costs. That number — not the invoice, not the deck — is what you actually bought.
Now watch what happens to it. Some of every engagement is fixed overhead: the monthly call, the report, and the twenty minutes it takes to remember where things stood since you last spoke. That overhead costs roughly the same whether you bought four hours or twenty-four. It comes off the top.
| 4 hours | 8 hours (one working day) | 24 hours (three days) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Understanding the business right now | 0.5 h | 1 h | 2 h |
| Diagnosis: what matters most | 0.5 h | 1 h | 4 h |
| Actual craft | 1 h | 4–5 h | 14 h |
| Measurement and follow-through | — | — | 2 h |
| Report and meeting | 2 h | 1.5 h | 2 h |
| What you get | Monitoring. Two flagged problems and a report. Nothing got better. | One thing gets finished, every month. Slow, but it compounds. | A project, not a task. Hypotheses get tested and the course corrected inside the month. |
At four hours, half the budget is spent reporting that nothing was done. The report is the deliverable. That is the entire product.
Below the floor, you’re not buying less marketing. You’re buying a report about marketing you didn’t get.
This is why Alexander won’t take an engagement under one working day a month. Not as a sales rule — as an honesty rule. Below that, he can’t affect the outcome, and both parties would be pretending otherwise.
Why the agency can’t fix this by putting a senior on it
The obvious response is: fine, then put the senior on the four hours. It doesn’t work, and the reason is structural.
A senior specialist is expensive. Once you load in payroll taxes, overhead, tools, bench time, account managers and the sales organisation, the internal cost of one genuinely billable senior hour lands remarkably close to what agencies sell a senior hour for. The margin on senior delivery is roughly zero. The same hour delivered by a junior carries a healthy one.
So the agency doesn’t choose the junior because it’s careless. It chooses the junior because the senior version isn’t a viable business at the price the market has agreed to pay. Leverage — a few expensive seniors winning work and “overseeing” it, a wide base of cheaper juniors executing it — isn’t a scandal. It’s the only shape the business can take at prevailing rates.
Which leads somewhere uncomfortable for buyers, too: if you negotiated your fee down hard, you didn’t win a better deal. You negotiated the seniors off your account, and nobody told you.
Same eight hours, two different people
Now the part that isn’t about quantity at all.
Give a junior eight hours. They open the task list and do eight hours of tasks. Every one of the tasks gets done. The report goes green.
Give a senior the same eight hours. They spend the first one asking what’s happening in the business this month — what’s selling, what’s stuck, what’s expensive — and then translate that into their own discipline. The remaining seven go into the one thing that matters.
A junior does the wrong thing well. A senior does the right thing.
This is the origin of the green report that sits on top of a red business. The report isn’t lying. Every channel really is climbing. It’s just that nobody asked whether the thing that’s climbing is connected to the thing that pays the bills. Rankings up, sessions up, impressions up — and the pipeline flat. Three dashboards, three partial truths, and no one answering for the whole.
Alexander has written about that specific failure on the Memorise blog, and it’s the same disease as the floor: activity is easy to buy, judgement is not.
The conductor
So if the senior doesn’t do the work, what exactly are you paying them for?
Alexander’s answer is a conductor. The conductor doesn’t play an instrument. The conductor is nonetheless the reason eighty people sound like an orchestra instead of eighty people practising at once — and the conductor does not leave the hall when the music starts.
That’s precisely where the agency model breaks. It sells you a conductor, and when the performance begins, they’ve gone to the next room. The orchestra keeps playing. It still sounds like music. That’s what makes it so hard to notice.
He was willing to publish his own numbers, which is more than most of us do:
- 12 engagements where he owns the strategy and the direction
- 1–3 hours per engagement, per month — that’s the whole conductor’s job
- 1–5 hours to onboard a new client and actually understand the business
- 25 engagements where he’s hand-picked the senior specialists who deliver
Twelve engagements at one to three hours is twelve to thirty-six hours a month. It adds up — but only because he isn’t doing the craft, and isn’t pretending to. The craft belongs to specialists who are each senior in their own right, and who each have their own floor to respect.
As he puts it on his own profile:
“A senior specialist who has actually done the thing before is always worth more than a junior team with a nice PowerPoint.”
What to ask before you sign
- Divide your fee by a senior hourly rate. Is the answer at least eight? If not, ask what you’re actually buying.
- Who does the work? By name. Not the account manager. The person whose hands are on your SEO, your ads, your tracking.
- How many accounts does that person carry? Then do the same division on their calendar.
- When something breaks, how many hops before it reaches someone who can fix it?
- Does the monthly report explain your business, or just the channel? “Sessions up 18%” is a channel fact. Whether it turned into pipeline is the only question that matters.
If the honest answers point to people you’ve never met, you bought a pitch, not a partner.
Quick answers
How many hours a month do I need to see results from an agency? As a rule of thumb, at least one working day — around eight hours. Below that, the fixed overhead of reporting and staying oriented consumes most of the budget, and little craft is left. Four hours mostly buys monitoring.
Why do agencies hand the work to juniors after the pitch? Because senior delivery carries almost no margin at prevailing market rates, while junior delivery carries a healthy one. It’s the economics of agency leverage, not carelessness — which is exactly why asking nicely won’t change it.
Does a senior specialist actually do the hands-on work? Often not, and that can be legitimate — if they’re conducting rather than playing. The test is whether they stay accountable for the outcome and remain reachable, or whether they disappear after the kickoff and reappear at renewal.
Is a low agency fee a good deal? Rarely. A fee below the floor doesn’t buy a discounted version of the same work. It buys reporting, and the seniors quietly leave your account.
Written together by Katarina Dahlin and Alexander Larsson.
Katarina Dahlin is an SEO expert, speaker and Senior Growth Hacker specialising in off-page SEO and AI visibility. She writes about SEO and growth at katarinadahlin.com.
Alexander Larsson is the founder of Memorise, a Gothenburg growth network built on a simple promise: marketing that shows up in the business, not just in the invoice.