Not Sure if I am Getting Scammed

Hello, I’m a small business owner with a relatively niche product. I’ve been using an agency for quite some time in regards to managing my SEO and Google Ads. I was told by them initially that it would take about 1k a month for 6 months to hit top 10 for keywords I was after plus link buys at 5k quarterly. That didn’t do much and now I was told 3k monthly plus 7.5k link buys quarterly. I’m now 5 months in and not seeing the results for the keywords I’m looking at but have had some leads. Definitely not enough. Any steps to address this as someone who doesn’t have knowledge with SEO? I’m a business owner and not sure I have the time to learn everything. It seems like there’s so much Grey in this space. I spoke with other companies but everyone said something different… Thanks so much in advance!