The worst time to discover that your agency holds the only admin login to your Google Ads account is the afternoon after you've told them you're leaving. If you're working out how to fire your marketing agency, the order you do things in matters more than the conversation itself.
Whether the split is friendly or not, the goal is the same: on the day the engagement ends, you can open every account, export every asset and keep sending email to the people who agreed to hear from you. Here's the sequence I'd follow.
1. Read the notice clause before you say anything
Find the agreement and read four things: the notice period, what's owed during it, who owns the work product, and what happens to work that's half finished. Notice periods vary, so don't assume yours. Knowing the date the engagement actually ends lets you plan the handover backwards from it, rather than scrambling after the fact.
2. Check who holds the keys
This is the part founders skip, and it's the part that hurts. Go through every account your marketing touches and confirm that someone on your own team holds the top level of access, not just a login:
Domain registrar and DNS. The registrar account should be in your company's name, on a company email address. DNS is where your website, your email authentication and half your tools point from.
Analytics. In Google Analytics, only the Administrator role can add and remove users and assign roles (sourced from Google Analytics Help). If nobody at your company is an Administrator, fix that first.
Search Console. Owners have full control, and there are two kinds: verified owners, who proved ownership with a verification token, and delegated owners, who were granted it by a verified owner. If every verified owner is removed, the remaining users and delegated owners lose access after a grace period (sourced from Search Console Help). Make sure a verified owner is yours.
Ad accounts. In Google Ads, Admin access is the level that can give account access, change access levels and manage product links (sourced from Google Ads Help). Run the same check on LinkedIn Campaign Manager and anything else you buy ads through, and confirm whose payment method is on file.
CRM and marketing automation. Who is the super admin, and whose card pays for the seats?
Email sending. The sending domain's authentication records live in your DNS, but the sending account lives on a platform. Both need to be yours.
The software-company extras. The ones a generic exit checklist misses: the app subdomain, the docs site, the changelog, in-product messaging, and the lifecycle sequences wired into your product events.
3. Export what you can't re-create
Some things are cheap to rebuild and some aren't. Before access changes, export the expensive ones: historical reports, ad creative and copy, keyword and audience research, content drafts and briefs, your tracking and campaign-naming conventions, and the logic behind every automated sequence. A screenshot of a workflow is better than nothing. A written description of why it branches where it does is better still.
4. Pause campaigns, don't delete them
Deleting a campaign takes its history with it, and that history is what tells the next person what has already been tried. Pause anything in flight, note the date and the reason, and let whoever comes next decide what to restart.
5. Move the email list without breaking CASL
Here's the one with legal weight. Exporting a CSV of contacts from one platform and importing it into another moves the addresses. It doesn't move your proof that those people agreed to hear from you.
Under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), every commercial electronic message needs consent, identification of the sender, and a working unsubscribe mechanism. The unsubscribe link has to stay valid for at least 60 days after you send, and a request has to be processed without delay and no later than 10 business days after it's received. The onus is on whoever claims consent to prove it (all sourced from the CRTC's CASL guidance). So, during the switch:
Export the consent source and date for every contact, not only the address.
Carry your unsubscribe list across before you send anything from the new platform.
Make sure someone is watching for unsubscribe requests that land during the handover, and processing them on time.
Check that the sender identification in your templates names your company, not the agency.
This is marketing guidance, not legal advice. For anything consequential, talk to counsel. If the sequences themselves need rethinking once they're back in your hands, start with this lifecycle email primer.
6. Set the handover date after the last invoice
Confirm every access change is done, and you've tested logging in yourself, before the final payment goes out. Ask for a short written handover: what's live, what's paused, what was planned next and why. A good agency will be glad to write it, because it's the last thing you'll remember them by.
Then decide what comes next
Firing an agency is the easy decision. Choosing what replaces it is the harder one, and the questions worth asking the next agency are a good place to start.
If you'd rather have someone read what you've inherited before you choose, that's exactly what the Diagnostic is for: a fixed-scope, written read of your stack and a sequenced 90-day plan that's yours to keep, whoever you hire next.
Before any of that, one quick test: which of your marketing accounts could you open yourself, right now, without asking anyone for a password?