Choosing an agency: the questions we get asked most

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The questions about choosing an agency that come up most often on our calls.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Do we need to care about this?

Ask who will actually do the work. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How do we know it is working?

References matter more than the pitch deck. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What this looks like day to day

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. 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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.