Three myths about choosing an agency

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. A few things about choosing an agency that get repeated more often than they get checked.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

“It only matters for big sites”

Ask who will actually do the work. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

“Our platform handles it”

References matter more than the pitch deck. 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.

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
• 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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.