Today we’re celebrating an exciting 5-year anniversary at GO. No, it’s not the start date of a key team member, nor a celebratory reminder of a key GO client-partner. It’s not even connected to the opening of our Atlanta office.

On June 30, 2018, we kicked-off our longest-ever project.

And today, five years later, our new go-agency.com website is (finally) live.
A lot has changed in the past 1,826 days. 

 

Oh, and thrown in there, we’ve (all) weathered a pandemic, remote work, virtual schooling, economic ups and downs, and the regular ebbs and flows of life and business.

 

So why couldn’t we redo our own website?

 

In the agency world – and the broader service industry – we know how important it is to prioritize our clients' needs. After all, they are the ones paying the bills and keeping businesses afloat. When given the choice to deploy human and capital resources towards a project, the answer is simple – we always put our clients first. That’s part of our whole, “do good work with good people, for good people” mantra.

 

Inevitably, that means that internal projects get perpetually backburnered. In reflecting back on this marathon project, I can point to three key factors to consider whenever you tackle an internal project; be it a website, thought leadership, or broader inbound marketing efforts.

 

A website is the heart and soul of every organization’s market awareness and business development efforts. If we frame the project as part of the lifeblood of the organization and treat it with the importance and care as a client project or a key hire, it will be less likely to languish in the purgatory of “work-in-progress.”

 

It’s difficult to staff internal projects when everyone is already busy working on client work. If the organization treats the project as a lower priority and one that lacks accountability, team members will inevitably keep it at the end (or off) their own to-do lists. 

 

As a creative agency, tackling our own website is simultaneously an enviable and unenviable task. It’s enviable since we have incredibly talented designers and developers – that are on the cutting edge of the industry – to execute the project. Heck, we do this for clients all the time. The unenviable piece lies in a team of perfectionists that cannot imagine a final product that is anything less than “perfect”.

 

We’ve all heard the old adage that “perfection is the enemy of progress.” Never is this truer than when working on your own brand and business. We need to learn to set “perfect” aside. Make moves. Make mistakes. Learn quickly. Move forward stronger.

 

The trick is to strip the project down to only the most important elements, focus on the underlying purpose, and make sure you are giving consumers (prospective clients) what they need to be successful. In the end, we have a beautiful, flexible, and simple site that ably prioritizes what our current and future clients look for: our work, our services, and the people that make us GO.

 

Now, excuse me while we start planning our next five-year web redesign.

 

Just kidding. (I hope.)

 

Chad