Why Your Last Agency Didn’t Deliver

I’ve worked for big companies and small companies. Almost all of them hired agencies at one point or another. To be honest, I was never a fan. Agencies always felt like a lot of theater and not a lot of substance.

When I came here, I realized just how much of that theater is baked into the industry. Agencies sell polish, not truth. They tell you what you want to hear, not what you need to fix.

That said, I don’t think agencies are worthless. They can bring real value, when they actually do the work.

• Outside perspective. Companies are often too close to their own problems. Teams convince themselves their challenges are unique, when in reality, they’re often symptoms of the same issues that plague every organization: misaligned goals, broken journeys, wasted tools. An outside agency can cut through the bias and politics to show what’s really going on.
• Focus. Internal teams have day jobs. Marketing still has campaigns to run, sales still has numbers to hit, IT still has fires to put out. A major digital project can’t compete with those priorities. Agencies can focus where internal teams can’t, driving progress without competing against the rest of the business.
• Expertise. This is the big one. Working inside a single company, you only ever see one way of doing things. Working inside an agency, you see hundreds. I’ve seen nearly every variation of the same problem across industries. That matters, because while the problems are often the same, the solutions never are. Knowing the difference between a dead-end tactic and a proven path forward is what separates a project that delivers outcomes from one that wastes budget.

That’s the value agencies should bring. Unfortunately, most don’t.

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Discovery Theater

I’ve sat in the so-called discovery sessions. A handful of predictable questions, no follow-ups, no validation. Whatever you say in those meetings is enshrined as the truth and becomes the foundation of the entire project. And if those assumptions are wrong, then everything built on top of them is wrong too.

Where things really go off the rails is when stakeholders start throwing their weight around. If they weren’t part of the process from the beginning, if they didn’t see how decisions were made, how the data, SMEs, and customer voice all fit together, that’s when "feelings" creep back in. Late in projects, as launch gets closer, I’ve seen executives get cold feet, start looking at competitors, and assume they should copy them without any evidence. We have to remind them how we got here. We have to remind them that the decisions are rooted in data and validation, not in what looks good on someone else’s homepage.

That’s the difference between real discovery and theater. One strips away assumptions until the truth stands. The other just takes what you say at face value and hopes it holds up.

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Technology Over Truth

Technology-first thinking is the most predictable agency failure. Projects get scoped around platforms instead of outcomes. I’ve seen it too many times: bloated stacks with overlapping tools, licenses piling up, teams drowning in integrations they never asked for.

We helped a SaaS company get out from under Salesforce and FreshDesk. Between duplicated services and developer fees, they were wasting $33,000 a year. By consolidating into HubSpot, we eliminated the duplication and cut out the overhead, freeing budget for actual growth initiatives. Another client, an association, was burning money on RealMagnet. By migrating them into a leaner, integrated stack, we gave them better results at a fraction of the cost.

The wrong platform choice doesn’t just cost money; it sinks adoption. A life sciences client of ours was sold on Adobe AEM. Big platform, big name. But they had a two-person marketing team. They didn’t have the resources to run it. It became shelfware. They spent more chasing the prestige of the tool than they ever could support in practice.

That’s what happens when agencies push what they know, or what looks good on paper, instead of what actually fits the team and the goals. The tech becomes the point, not the outcomes it was supposed to support.

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Templates Masquerading as Strategy

This one is almost laughable. I’ve seen the personas with fake names and hobbies: “Mary, 42, likes yoga.” None of that tells you how Mary makes a decision or what stops her from buying. It’s filler, theater dressed up as strategy.

What actually changes things is when you build personas and journeys out of real inputs: customer interviews, SME insights, support tickets, win/loss notes, analytics. The first drafts of these always surprise clients. And the magic happens in validation workshops. You put all the data points on the table, from customers, from the team, from the analytics, and suddenly insights emerge they had never seen before. It’s not that people are dumb. It’s that no one person has the full picture. Pulling it together unlocks learning every single time. That’s when strategy stops being a template and starts being a guide.

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Surface-Level Fixes

Redesigns are the easiest thing for agencies to sell. Everyone loves new visuals. But visuals don’t fix broken journeys, missing content, or duct-taped integrations. Too often, the new site looks good for 6 months and then performance flatlines.

That’s why we don’t jump straight to “pretty comps” anymore. We start with content blueprints. They strip out design so we can align on how a page builds awareness, understanding, and action. Once the journey is agreed on, the visuals can change without breaking the structure. We learned this the hard way, after watching designers bend content just to satisfy feedback on comps, creating pages that made no sense. Now, when design comes in, the structure is locked. The look may evolve, but the blueprint doesn’t. Everyone is along for the journey, no surprises, no last-minute scrambles.

That’s how you avoid a surface-level fix. You build from the inside out.

The Cycle of Rework

The real cost of agency shortcuts isn’t the launch itself. It’s the treadmill that follows. Companies spend six or seven figures on a site, watch performance plateau, and then end up back at square one every 2 to 5 years. A full rebuild, another cycle of disruption, more wasted money.

We don’t let that happen. Launch is the starting line, not the finish. The real gains come from regular optimization cadences. Every three months, we analyze, find new opportunities, test, tweak, and adjust. It’s the same Pathfinder process, just applied continuously. Rinse and repeat. That’s how you see massive performance gains after launch, not a plateau.

It’s the difference between treating digital as a one-time project versus treating it as a living ecosystem. One guarantees you’ll be back at it in a few years. The other keeps compounding results.

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Breaking the Cycle

Projects don’t fail because people can’t execute. They fail because the foundation is wrong, or missing entirely. Most agencies sell theater because it’s faster to sell and easier to deliver. But theater doesn’t survive launch.

The real value of an agency is expertise applied with proof. Seeing the patterns, validating assumptions, and finding the right path forward for your team and your goals. Not the last client’s. Yours.

That’s the difference between decoration and progress. It’s also why your last agency didn’t deliver.

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