How to get choosing an agency right
We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. The short answer to choosing an agency is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
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.
Why it matters
Ask who will actually do the work. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Look at sites they built two years ago, not just last month
- References matter more than the pitch deck
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
References matter more than the pitch deck. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
Turning this into a decision
In practice
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
- 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
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.