What to ask your agency about choosing an agency

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on choosing an agency, these questions are worth asking early.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Ask who will actually do the work. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

References matter more than the pitch deck. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The short version

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.