Getting started with choosing an agency
It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. A short on-ramp to choosing an agency for teams who have not touched it before.
The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
The reason this keeps coming up
Ask who will actually do the work. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Look at sites they built two years ago, not just last month
- Change one thing and measure it
References matter more than the pitch deck. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
What this looks like day to day
Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about choosing an agency before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- References matter more than the pitch deck — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.