As an agency owner, you either agree or disagree with that statement.  If you work for an agency owner, they might be holding back on letting you know how they really feel about that last project you took on with them...

Here's an inside look at what it can typically look like and why your agency is quick to outsource fully or just not offer this key service.

As an owner, from client acquisition to team management, your plate is full. But when it comes to website projects, the pressure can escalate quickly. What often starts as a straightforward project can spiral into a vortex of scope creep, communication breakdowns, and missed deadlines—leaving you frustrated, your business disrupted, and your team overwhelmed.

Let’s dive into why website projects are so uniquely painful for agency owners, how they impact your business flow, and what you can do to minimize the chaos.

1. Client Misalignments: The Account Manager’s Nightmare

Clients are your lifeblood, but they can also be your biggest source of frustration when it comes to website projects. A misaligned client can wreak havoc, pushing your team to the brink with unrealistic expectations, scope changes, and constant micromanagement. The result? Account managers are left pulling their hair out, trying to keep both the client and the internal team on track.

The Pain Points:

• Scope Creep: Clients continuously add new requests without adjusting the budget or deadline, forcing your team to scramble. Account managers are stuck trying to manage expectations while your developers work overtime.
• Unrealistic Timelines: Clients often expect quick turnarounds without understanding the complexities involved in development, leaving your team exhausted and pressured to deliver subpar work just to meet impossible deadlines.
• Unclear Project Goals: When clients don’t have a clear vision, it leads to miscommunication and endless revisions. Your team ends up spending more time fixing misunderstandings than doing the work they were hired to do.
• Micromanagement: Some clients want to be involved in every decision, slowing down the process and demotivating your team. The constant back-and-forth chips away at efficiency and team morale.
• Late Feedback: Even when clients delay providing necessary feedback, they still expect the project to launch on time—leaving your team to work in crunch mode.

Impact on Your Business Flow: These issues disrupt your project timelines, putting strain on your operations and risking client dissatisfaction. You’re constantly juggling deadlines, trying to keep clients happy while managing an overworked team. Worse, scope creep and micromanagement eat into your profit margins, turning website projects into low-margin, high-stress endeavors.

2. Content Chaos: A Content Writer’s Worst Fear

A website is only as good as the content that fills it, but too often, clients either don’t provide content on time or send over materials that are outdated or poorly structured. This puts your content writers and strategists in a bind, forcing them to create miracles out of thin air—or worse, to work with whatever the client gives them, even if it’s detrimental to the overall strategy.

The Pain Points:

• Lack of Content: Clients don’t deliver content on time, stalling the entire project. Your writers and developers are left in limbo, unable to proceed.
• Poor Content Strategy: Clients send over disorganized text and outdated images, expecting your team to somehow make it all work. This leads to frustration for both the strategist and the designer, who must somehow align the client’s vision with the reality of the site’s needs.
• Unrealistic SEO Expectations: Clients expect immediate results from their content in terms of SEO, not understanding that optimization is an ongoing process. Your strategists are stuck explaining the basics while still trying to meet high expectations.
• Outdated Branding: Clients insist on using old logos or branding assets that no longer align with modern design trends, forcing your designers to work with materials that don’t fit the site’s aesthetic.
• Constant Redesign Requests: Clients frequently request changes to follow the latest design trends, leading to endless revisions and a frustrated design team.

Impact on Your Business Flow: When clients fail to deliver content on time, your projects are stalled, and timelines are thrown off. Your content team is constantly under pressure to “make it work” with what’s provided, creating inefficiencies and adding stress. Poor content strategies hurt the effectiveness of the site, leading to unsatisfied clients and more work for your team to clean up the mess later.

3. Design and Technical Challenges: Where Developers Feel the Burn

Designers and developers are at the heart of your website projects, but they’re often left to deal with the fallout of poor client communication, unrealistic expectations, and technical constraints. This causes major pain points for your team and, by extension, your business.

The Pain Points:

• Browser Compatibility Issues: Clients expect their sites to work perfectly on every browser, including outdated ones. Your developers spend countless hours troubleshooting issues that could have been avoided with clear client education.
• Technical Limitations: Clients request complicated features without understanding the time and budget required. Developers are left to explain why certain features are impractical or out of scope, adding stress to an already full workload.
• Budget Constraints: Clients want a high-end website with a champagne budget but provide you with a shoestring budget, forcing your designers to make compromises that ultimately impact the quality of the project.
• Lack of Mobile Optimization Awareness: Clients often don’t understand the importance of responsive design, leaving your team to fix mobile experience issues after the fact.
• Unforeseen Integrations: Clients suddenly request integrations with third-party platforms late in the process, throwing a wrench into the project timeline and making your developers scramble to accommodate.

Impact on Your Business Flow: Design and technical challenges lead to inefficiencies, overtime work, and budget overruns. Your team becomes demotivated and burned out, which negatively impacts their performance on current and future projects. Meanwhile, you’re left trying to balance the client’s demands with your team’s bandwidth and expertise.

4. Operational Roadblocks: The Agency Owner’s Headache

Beyond client and technical issues, operational roadblocks can derail your agency’s ability to run efficiently. Payment delays, endless revisions, and complex approval processes slow down your business flow and make website projects feel more like a burden than an opportunity.

The Pain Points:

• Payment Delays: Clients drag their feet on paying after a project is launched, leaving you to chase down invoices and manage cash flow issues.
• Hosting or Domain Issues: Clients don’t understand the technical aspects of hosting and domains, leaving your team to clean up the mess while trying to launch the site.
• Endless Revisions: Clients continuously change their minds, requiring scope shifts and pushing back launch dates. This creates friction between your team and the client and impacts the quality of the final product.
• Difficult Approvals: Client-side approval processes often involve too many stakeholders, leading to decision-making bottlenecks and dragging out the timeline.
• Communication Breakdowns: Poor communication between the agency, client, and internal team results in misunderstandings, mistakes, and missed deadlines.

Impact on Your Business Flow: When operational roadblocks pile up, your entire business flow is disrupted. You spend more time managing payments, approvals, and revisions than focusing on new opportunities or improving your business. These inefficiencies affect profitability and create a stressful work environment for your team.

The Solution: Partnering for Success

I've worked with 100's of agencies on hundreds of projects.  I've logged over 20,000 hours in HubSpot just on HubSpot Websites.  After selling and delivering this sheer volume of projects I've developed a process that you can access.  From the sale, to the scope, to the delivery of work and the long haul afterwards, I've addressed these problems in how I do the work.  Earlier today, I wrote about how I worked with an agency to tackle these exact problems. If you’re curious about how that turned out, you can read all about it here.

If you’ve made it this far without needing an Advil, congrats—you’re a pro at handling the chaos. If not, don’t worry, the "doctor" is in. You can schedule some time.  I've made my calendar available to you below.