Five mistakes teams make with choosing an agency

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit choosing an agency.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Warning signs

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Ask who will actually do the work
• Look at sites they built two years ago, not just last month
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

References matter more than the pitch deck. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Turning this into a decision

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• Look at sites they built two years ago, not just last month — 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.