You have signed, the retainer is running, and four weeks later the honest summary of month one is that everybody chased access and nothing shipped. It happens constantly, it is almost entirely preventable, and the preparation takes about half a day of somebody’s time before the kickoff call.
Assemble the access pack before the kickoff, not after
Write a list and work through it. Administrator access to your analytics property. Search Console, verified. Google Ads, with billing details confirmed. Facebook Business Manager, owned by the company rather than sitting on a former employee’s personal profile, which is the single most common blocker we hit. Your content management system and hosting. Your domain registrar. Google My Business, claimed and verified. The product feed, if you sell online. Your email platform. Brand assets in source format, with the font licenses, not just exported images.
Two of those will fail. The domain will be registered to a developer who stopped working with you in 2018, or the Business Manager will belong to an agency you left last year and nobody kept the login. Find out in week zero, because recovering a domain or a business asset takes weeks and there is no way to shorten it once the clock is running.
How to brief an agency: the commercial truth, not the marketing story
Most briefs describe the brand. Very few describe the business, and the business is what determines the plan. Give them margin by product line, so nobody optimizes hard for the line you barely make money on. Give them your genuine best sellers, which are frequently not the ones the founder likes. Give them capacity limits, because generating demand you cannot service is worse than generating none.
Then the operational numbers that shape everything downstream in this market. Average order value. Cash on delivery refusal rate, honestly stated. Delivery times by governorate, not the marketing version. Response times on phone and chat, including evenings and weekends. Which customer segments you would rather not attract, and why.
Add the history. What you have already tried, what it cost and what happened. Agencies repeat failed experiments constantly because nobody told them the experiment had been run.
One decision maker and a written definition of done
Name one approver with real authority and a committed turnaround, ideally two working days. Approval by committee is the most expensive thing in any engagement, because it converts a team you are paying into a team that is waiting.
Then agree in writing what done looks like at day thirty. Our version is four things: tracking implemented and verified against your own order data, the audit delivered with a prioritized list, baselines for every metric written down and signed off by both sides, and at least one thing live. Baselines matter more than anything else on that list. If you do not record where you started, month three becomes an argument about whether anything improved, and nobody ever wins that argument.
Budgets moved online in a hurry this year and a lot of teams onboarded an agency in a rush to keep up. The half day of preparation above is the difference between buying twelve months of work and buying eleven. If you want the audit part of that ready before you even appoint anybody, start with the free audit.
