If you fired your marketing company on Friday, what would you still own on Monday?

Picture the least dramatic version of this. No blowup, no unpaid invoice. You just decide in the fall that the marketing company you hired two years ago is not worth what it costs, and you give notice. Friday is their last day. On Monday morning you sit down to keep the ads running - and you find out that the Google Ads account is inside their manager account, the Meta pixel belongs to their business portfolio, the tracking number printed on eleven trucks is billed to their phone provider, and the only person who can log into your website host is a project manager who no longer works there.

Nobody stole anything. Every one of those was set up that way on day one, because it was faster for the vendor and nobody at your company asked. Ownership inside an ad platform is not established by who paid the invoice - it is a permissions setting, and permissions were assigned before you knew there was a decision to make.

The eight assets, and who should hold the keys

Everything a marketing company touches for you falls into one of two buckets: work product you rent, and business assets you should own outright. The list below is the second bucket. In every case the correct arrangement is the same - the asset lives in your name, and the vendor is granted access to it.

• •Google Ads account. Yours, with you as an Admin. The agency's manager account (MCC) gets linked to it, not the other way around.
• •Meta ad account and pixel. Both owned by your Business Portfolio, with the agency added as a Partner. The pixel matters more than the ad account - it is where every custom audience and lookalike you have built for two years actually lives.
• •Local Services Ads profile. The license, insurance, and background checks behind your Google Guaranteed badge are verified against your business, so the profile should sit under an account you control. Your LSA review history is attached to it.
• •Google Business Profile. You are the Primary Owner. The agency is a Manager. A Manager cannot remove an Owner, which is exactly the asymmetry you want.
• •Domain name. In your registrar account, paid on your card. This is the single most common one to get wrong and the most damaging to lose.
• •Website and its content. Hosting you can access and a full export you could hand to somebody else. Proprietary page builders you cannot export from are a rental, and should be priced like one.
• •Call tracking numbers. In an account where your company is the subscriber of record. Numbers are portable by law, but the port has to be authorized by whoever holds the account - and that is not always you.
• •Customer and lead data. Your CRM, your call recordings, your lead history, exportable to CSV today without asking anybody.

Why the ad account is the expensive one to lose

Losing the domain is the scariest item on that list, but losing the Google Ads account is usually the one that costs real money, and contractors consistently underrate it. A mature search or LSA account is not a set of keywords you can copy into a spreadsheet. It is an accumulated record - months of conversion data, historical quality signals on your keywords, and a Smart Bidding model that has learned which searches in your ZIP codes turn into booked jobs and which ones waste $40.

Start a brand-new account and none of that comes with you. Google's own guidance on significant bidding changes is to allow roughly one to two weeks for the algorithm to re-learn, and that assumes steady conversion volume. A plumbing company doing 60 conversions a month gets through it. A roofer doing 15 spends six weeks paying tuition on an education he already bought once. Whoever set that account up under their own manager account was, intentionally or not, building a switching cost into your business.

The second cost is that you cannot audit what you cannot open. When the agency's card is on the ad account and you receive one bundled invoice, you are reading a number written by the party being graded. If there is a markup on your ad spend, it is invisible - and it silently corrupts every cost-per-booked-job calculation you make downstream. Your own card on your own account means the platform invoice is the truth, not a claim.

The 20-minute audit

Do this yourself, logged in as you, from your own email address. Not on a screen share with the vendor driving. If the answer to any of these is "I'd have to ask them," you have your answer.

1. 1.Google Ads. Sign in at ads.google.com. Go to Admin, then Access and security. Find your own email in the user list and check that it says Admin. On the Managers tab, note every manager account linked to yours. Then open Billing, then Settings and look at the payment profile - is that your business and your card?
2. 2.Meta. Open Business Settings at business.facebook.com. Under Accounts, then Ad accounts, confirm the ad account is owned by your business portfolio. Under Data sources, then Datasets, do the same for the pixel. Then check the Partners tab - the agency should appear there.
3. 3.Local Services Ads. Open the LSA dashboard and look at profile settings and account access. Confirm you can see your budget, your leads, and your dispute history without a middleman.
4. 4.Google Business Profile. Open your profile, go to Settings, then People and access, and confirm you are listed as Primary Owner. While you are there, search your business name on Maps for duplicate listings someone created years ago.
5. 5.Domain. Run a public WHOIS lookup on your domain to find the registrar, then log into that registrar. Cannot log in? You do not control your domain, which means you do not control your email either.
6. 6.Website. Ask one question: can I get a complete backup or export of this site, today, in a format another developer can use? A yes with a delay is fine. A no is a real answer worth knowing.
7. 7.Phone numbers. Call your call-tracking provider and ask whose name the account is in. Any number you have printed on a truck, a yard sign, or a door hanger is a number you must be able to port.
8. 8.Data. Export your leads and customers to CSV right now. If you cannot do it without a request, do it as a request - monthly.

Fixing it without blowing up a relationship that works

Plenty of marketing companies set things up this way out of habit, not malice, and will fix it in an afternoon if you ask plainly. Ask plainly.

• •Ask for Admin, not Standard. On Google Ads, Standard access looks like full access until the day you need to remove somebody or unlink a manager account. Only Admin can do that.
• •Move ownership, then re-grant access. The goal is not to lock the vendor out. It is to invert the arrangement so access flows from you to them. Say exactly that - most partners hear it as reasonable, because it is.
• •If the account cannot be transferred, start the clock now. Meta ad accounts and some LSA setups can be genuinely awkward to move between business entities. Better to discover that in month four of a working relationship than in week one of a bad breakup.
• •Watch the response, not just the outcome. A vendor who explains the transfer process is a partner. A vendor who tells you the accounts have to stay in their name "for compliance" or "how our system works" has just told you what the renewal conversation is going to feel like.

What to put in the next agreement

Four lines. They are not adversarial and any confident shop will sign them.

1. 1.All advertising accounts, profiles, domains, and tracking numbers are created in the client's name, and the agency is granted access to them.
2. 2.Ad spend is billed by the platform directly to the client's payment method, with no markup, management fee percentage, or bundled media charge.
3. 3.The client can export leads, customers, and call recordings at any time without a fee.
4. 4.On termination, the agency removes its own access within five business days and transfers nothing, because there is nothing to transfer.

That fourth line is the point of the whole exercise. A clean exit is one where the offboarding checklist is empty.

Why we build it this way

ProForged does it in that order on purpose. Your Google and Meta accounts are opened in your name on day one, the platforms bill your card, and we never mark up ad spend - so the number in your ad account is the number that left your bank. The tracking numbers, the call recordings, and the customer data are yours the same way. If you leave, you keep the account, the conversion history, and the bidding model you paid two years to build. We think that is the correct incentive: we should have to keep earning the work every month, not hold the keys as collateral.

It is also why we only take one company per trade, per market. When the accounts belong to the client and the leads were never resold to three competitors, the only thing keeping a contractor around is whether the phone rings with work worth doing.

Run the audit this week even if you never call us - twenty minutes now is worth more than any article we could write. And if you want to see whether your trade and market are still open, check current capacity or get in touch.