Often, business owners hire an external marketing strategist to grow revenue, but are unwilling to change their team.
If you’re looking for growth, it’s usually more efficient and cost effective to start over with a new team.
My friend and colleague, who primarily works in social media management, brought me onto a project to do SEO consulting for her new client.
Looking at the client’s website, it needed a total overhaul.
On the front end, it had a hard to read color scheme and was difficult to navigate to booking services. Moreover, it wasn’t sending the proper signals to Google – resulting in poor search rankings.
Our team pitched a website rebuild to the business owner, explaining it would be most effective to redesign from scratch. However, the client shared that any changes made would have to go through their current designer.
Now, this isn’t meant to throw shade at their current designer. The client’s loyalty means they must be doing something right … even just fostering a positive relationship.
And yet, if the client was unhappy enough with their investment to bring in a new team, it’s ineffective to then pay 2 marketing teams to correct the issues of the original team.
As odd as it seems, it’s more common than you think.
I’ve run into a few different clients who weren’t happy with their web results but didn’t want to cut their designer off.
One of my first clients started as a consulting gig.
They weren’t happy with their web results, so they had me audit their site to show what was and wasn’t working. The website wasn’t aesthetically pleasing, was tough to navigate and, after looking through the data, wasn’t generating any traffic.
Read that again.
We’re not talking about leads, here. It wasn’t generating any traffic, at all.
But I couldn’t convince them to give up the designer.
They even let the current designer utilize my notes to rebuild the entire website themselves before realizing it was a lost cause. It took a full 13 months from the time they approached me about their site until I could finally take full control.
During that time, everything stayed the same, but cost the client double.
I was being paid for consulting and the designer was being paid to make changes but implemented none of my suggestions.
The website remained a cost opposed to a revenue generator. That’s 13 months of lost opportunity.
We took over the site fully in early 2026 and the results have been staggering. Since our redesign, the business has steadily averaged 2-4 new leads a week (in an industry with high revenue), and we’ve given them a 11X return on their investment.
Once we got into the nitty gritty details, we also found the previous designer had been charging for services that were not actually being provided.
The client is now happy to have a totally new team. Imagine the money and time we could have saved had we done this a year earlier!
The Main Takeaway
If your web performance is bad enough that you need to bring in a new team, it’s probably not wise to let the former team keep administrative control.
It’s more cost-effective to replace the team than to pay 2 teams to force a much-needed change.
If your marketing team is internal, don’t be afraid to move them to new positions and bring in outside experts.
But don’t stack 2 teams to do the work of 1. Trust us on this one!
Wondering if your web performance is in need of an overhaul?