Playing Musical Webmasters

Many people are always looking for a cheaper deal, or for a “better” person than they just hired. Improvement is a good thing, as is finding good value, but hopping too fast from one service provider to another is counterproductive.

Case Study: A client was offered a 1 year performance guarantee on some services we offered. He bailed at 10 months – during this time, he provided very little in the way of help to allow us to effectively do the job. He then abandoned his site for a year, then decided he wanted it to work for him again. He hired an in-house marketing pro. This person was inexperienced with the site structure, but was learning fast, and also had to learn the business needs and foundations well enough to promote it successfully. One week into the job, the site owner decided he was not seeing results fast enough, and fired the pro. He hired another, who jumped in with enthusiasm. Again, she had to learn how to do many of the tasks, and had to learn his business well enough to promote it well. Two weeks later, he fired her, and hired a third person because he felt the second one was not productive enough.

This business owner is shooting himself in the foot. He is not allowing anyone enough time to learn his business well enough to do the job he wants them to do, and is paying for the same unproductive time, over and over. With this kind of services, there is almost always some unproductive time in the beginning, because you have to lay groundwork. And every time you start over, the new person has to come in and re-lay that groundwork, because they can’t just pick up where the last one left off – they have to orient themselves to the job.

Another client had four websites when we came on the job, all of their previous websites were ineffective because they were never finished. They had us build another, which again, they never did the legwork on to get finished (every client has to cooperate to a certain extent, or a webmaster CANNOT do their job, and this client refused to cooperate with their part of things).  Two years later they hired yet another firm to build yet another site – we suspect this one will never be finished either.

Impatience, lack of understanding, or refusal to provide needed input can stop a business from marketing effectively online. If you spend all of your time starting over, then all of your resources are going into foundations, and you never end up with any kind of results. Results come after you have spend a LOT of time with structure on TOP of the foundation. They don’t come from the time you spend laying that foundation, and the foundation HAS to be laid. Otherwise nothing is ever going to come of it.

If you hire a pro, at least give them a chance to get past that spot, and then provide your part of the job. You won’t see results otherwise, and will waste your resources in endless searches for a quick fix where there is none.