Nine years without a single update.
I thought I’d seen it all, but this story unveils a profound, systemic breakdown in trust and partnership.
We had to make the call. The kind of phone call that makes your stomach turn because you have to tell a business owner they’ve been burning cash for nothing. Their previous agency hadn’t touched the site’s backend in nine years. That is essentially running Windows 95 while your competitors are leveraging AI.
Silence.
That’s what usually kills companies. Not the loud mistakes… but the quiet drift.
This situation exposes the rot in the standard “vendor” model. Most practitioners treat communication output as a static artifact—a one-time transaction rather than a living mechanism within a conversion system. They optimize for the billing cycle, not the outcome. When you separate strategic conception from execution accountability, you create a massive gap where value just leaks out, day after day, for nine years. The client pays for safety. They get decay.
We had to break the bad news.
We didn’t just fix the code. We had to recalibrate their entire understanding of what a partnership looks like. Because true partnership implies shared outcome co-ownership. If you aren’t sweating the result as much as the client, you’re just renting them space.
The tech is the easy part. Building a system that prevents this kind of entropy? That is the real work.
Has a “partner” ever let you drift?
Like & Comment if you’re tired of the silence. ⬇️
