Owners negotiate the wrong clause. The argument is always about the term. Six months, three months, can we do month to month. And the term is the one part of the agreement you can see coming. It's written on the front page and it has a date on it.
What keeps a school stuck with a supplier it wants to leave is almost never the term. It's the fact that on the day the term ends, the ad account is in someone else's business portfolio, the tracking history belongs to a pixel you can't access, the number on the ads forwards through a system you don't have a login for, and six hundred enquiries from the last eight months exist only inside a CRM you were never given the keys to.
You can walk away from all of that. You just can't take any of it with you, and what you're really doing is starting again from zero with a new supplier who has to rebuild everything, which is functionally the same as being locked in. The contract said you were free to go. The plumbing said otherwise.
This article is about the plumbing. The prior question, which billing model to buy in the first place and what each one rewards a supplier for doing, is worked through separately. Assume here you've chosen someone and you're at the paperwork.
First, in fairness: what a term genuinely buys the supplier
A minimum term isn't automatically predatory, and treating it that way will lose you some good suppliers.
There are real costs a supplier fronts in month one that they only recover over months two to six. Setting up tracking properly, building and testing the first round of creative, writing and wiring the follow-up sequences, learning enough about your timetable, your pricing and your catchment to stop guessing. Meta's own delivery system has a learning phase in which it works out who to show a new ad set to, and a significant edit, meaning a change to the audience, the creative or the optimisation event, puts it back into learning. None of that is billable in a way a client would accept as a line item, so it gets amortised across a term.
So when a supplier asks for six months, the fair question isn't "why are you locking me in". It's: what did you spend in month one that you need until month six to recover, and what happens to it if I leave in month three?
A supplier with a real answer will name the thing. Setup, creative, the account build. A supplier without one will talk about needing time for the strategy to mature, which is unfalsifiable. It's exactly what you'd say if you were three months from a breakthrough, and exactly what you'd say if you had nothing. One owner, writing to another school owner who'd asked him about us, put his own view on that plainly, and he was careful to label it as an opinion:
"They would always say we need to give it time but that is just to lock you in financially (personal oppinion)."
A school owner, in an email to another owner. Source:
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His opinion, and worth reading as one. The point for you is narrower and isn't a matter of opinion at all: a term recovering a named, real cost is a commercial arrangement you can evaluate. A term recovering an unnamed one is just a term.
Here's the practical version. If the setup cost is real, ask them to bill it as a setup fee and drop the term. Most suppliers will refuse, and that refusal is informative, because it means the term was never about the setup cost. Some will accept, and you've just converted a six-month commitment into a one-off invoice you can see.
The four things you should own in your own name
This is the section that matters. Whatever the term says, settle these four before the first dollar is spent, because every one of them is easy on day one and painful on day four hundred.
1. The ad account
On Meta, an ad account sits inside a business portfolio. One portfolio, not several. An agency can be added to your portfolio as a partner and given access to run your account, and that access can be removed by you at any time without anything moving. That's the arrangement you want.
The arrangement you don't want is the ad account living inside the agency's portfolio. It's quicker to set up, which is why it happens, and it means the account, its full spend and performance history, and everything learned inside it are theirs. When you leave, you don't get an account with a bad history. You get no account.
This is the detail worth carrying out of the whole article: Meta's own documentation states that once an ad account has been created inside a business's Business Manager, it cannot be transferred to another business's Business Manager. Not "is difficult to". Cannot. So this isn't a negotiation you can have later, when you're leaving and have nothing left to bargain with. It's a decision that is made once, silently, in the first week, usually by whoever is quickest with the setup. And it is final.
Google works differently but comes out the same way. A Google Ads account has its own customer ID and is linked to a manager account; the link can be broken and the account survives with its history intact. What matters is whether the account was created under your own login or theirs.
Ask one question: "Will the ads run in an account owned by my business, with you added as a partner?" If the answer needs qualifying, it's a no.
2. The tracking
Your Meta pixel, or dataset in current terminology, is a separate asset from the ad account and needs settling separately. It accumulates the record of who visited your site and what they did, and that record is what makes your ads cheaper over time. It is genuinely valuable and it is invisible, which is a bad combination.
Same rule. The pixel belongs to your business portfolio, shared with the agency. Not created inside theirs and pointed at your website.
The same applies to your Google Analytics property and your conversion tracking. If someone else created them, someone else can remove you from them.
3. The phone number and the enquiry route
If the ads use a tracking number, find out where it forwards and who holds the account with the provider. A tracking number is a sensible thing to use. It's how you tell which enquiries came from where. It becomes a problem when it's the number on eight months of ads, printed on a flyer, and sitting in your Google listing, and it's registered to your agency.
Same for the form. If enquiries arrive through a landing page on the agency's domain, the page dies when the relationship does, and any link anyone ever shared dies with it.
4. The lead list
The single most valuable thing the whole arrangement produces, and the one most likely to be overlooked, because it's the one you never see as a file.
Every enquiry, including the people who never booked, the people who booked and didn't show, and the people who came and didn't join, is a list of local families who raised their hand for exactly what you sell. That list is worth money for years. It's the raw material for reactivation campaigns, for a new programme launch, for the quiet months.
Ask two things. Can I export the full contact list, with what happened to each one, at any time, in a format I can actually use? And, will you do that within a set number of days if I leave? Get both in writing. "Yes of course, just ask" is not the same as a clause, and the day you want it is precisely the day goodwill is at its lowest.
Start exporting monthly now, incidentally, while everyone is friendly. A list you already hold cannot be withheld.
What a fair exit looks like
If you take nothing else from this, take these five lines, and ask for them as amendments if they're not already there. None of them is unreasonable and a decent supplier will agree to all five without much argument.
- A notice period, not a cliff. Thirty days is normal and fine. What you're avoiding is a term that auto-renews for another full six months unless you cancelled inside some narrow window you'd forgotten about. Auto-renewal is fine; auto-renewal with a cancellation window is a trap, and it's the single most common unfair clause in this industry.
- Asset handover named, with a deadline. Not "we'll transfer everything". Name them: ad account access, pixel, tracking number, landing pages, lead export. Give it a number of days.
- Work in progress settled on the way out. If they've built creative you paid for, say who keeps it. If they've fronted setup you're leaving before repaying, say what you owe. Both of those are reasonable; both are ugly when they're improvised at the point of divorce.
- No penalty for leaving on notice. A minimum term you've served, then notice. Not a term you've served plus a termination fee, which is the same term again wearing a different hat.
- A performance floor, if you can get one. Harder to get and worth asking about, because the answer is informative whatever it is. What result, by when, would they accept as the threshold below which you can leave early without penalty? If a supplier will commit to a number, you've learned something real about their confidence. If they won't commit to any number at all, you've learned something too.
The thing a contract can't fix
None of this makes the marketing work. You can have flawless paperwork, own every asset, and still be paying someone to run ads that nobody clicks.
What good paperwork does is limit the size of the mistake. It means a bad supplier costs you a few months and some money, rather than a few months, some money, and the entire accumulated apparatus of your marketing. That's the whole job of the contract: not to guarantee the outcome, but to make sure a bad outcome is survivable and reversible.
Which is also why the review rhythm is worth more than the clause. The owner quoted above rated something that has nothing to do with the agreement. The meeting:
"We have a monthly meeting with our rep going over any questions we have. In the beginning I believe it was every week or every other week to get you acclimated... I always look to see if we need to increase/decrease our budget depending on our stats."
A school owner. Source:
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Read what he's describing. He is looking at his own numbers on a schedule, and adjusting his spend because of what he sees. That's an owner who would know inside six weeks whether this was working, which means the contract term was never going to be what saved or trapped him. The people who get trapped are the ones who signed, stopped looking, and found out in month five.
Put a standing date in your own diary for the same thing, whoever you buy from. Fifteen minutes a month, your own numbers, in front of you.
Before you sign
- Ask what the term recovers. If they can name a real setup cost, ask to pay it as a fee instead. Watch what happens.
- Get the ad account and pixel in your own business portfolio, with them added as a partner. Do this before a single ad runs.
- Find out where the phone number forwards and whose account it's on.
- Get a lead export clause with a deadline in days, and start exporting the list yourself monthly from week one.
- Check the renewal clause for a cancellation window. If there's a window, ask for it to be removed and replaced with thirty days' notice at any time.
That's about half an hour of reading and one email. It's the cheapest insurance available to you in this whole arrangement.
Where we sit in this
We don't use a contract, so there's no term to negotiate and no notice to give. You run your own ad account with your own budget, and we're paid when a student walks into your school. If a month doesn't produce, you leave and we've earned nothing from it.
That's not offered here as a reason to pick us. It's offered because it means the five questions above have short answers in our case, and you should be asking them of everyone you talk to, including us. The supplier who most needs you committed before you've seen anything is telling you something about how confident they are in what you're about to see.
If you'd like to ask them of us directly, book a 15-minute call. If you're still at the earlier question of how you want to be billed at all, start with what each marketing billing model pays someone to do. And work out what one student is actually worth to you before you talk to anybody, because that number is what turns any price into a yes or a no.
Client quotes on this page are reproduced as written, from an email sent by the owner concerned to another school owner, and re-checked against the original screenshot. Source image: t42.png. The owner is anonymised here; the source material carries identifying details we have not reproduced. Nothing has been rounded, projected forward or tidied up, and the owner's own labelling of his lock-in remark as a personal opinion is his and is reproduced with it, as is his original spelling. The second quote is abridged where marked with an ellipsis and is not otherwise altered. No industry statistic, benchmark, average or survey result appears on this page. The descriptions of how Meta and Google advertising assets are owned and shared are drawn from the platforms' own help documentation, checked in September 2026 against the Meta Business Help Center, Google Ads Help and Google Analytics Help. They are an account of how the products work, not legal advice and not a claim about any named company; platform features change, so confirm the current arrangement with your own supplier before you rely on it. The contract terms described as fair are our own view of what a school owner should ask for, not a legal standard, and nothing here is a substitute for your own solicitor on a document you are about to sign.