Before you invest in choosing an agency

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Before you spend anything on choosing an agency, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Ask who will actually do the work
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

The mistakes we see most

Look at sites they built two years ago, not just last month. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

References matter more than the pitch deck. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about choosing an agency before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Ask who will actually do the work — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.