Originally published October 2011. Rewritten October 2026.
In 2011 I wrote a post on this blog with a title that didn’t undersell it: “I See Inexperience, Irresponsibility, and Poor Delivery All Too Often.”
I was early in running Seafoam. We mostly built websites. And nearly every new client told me some version of the same story. They had paid a lot and gotten very little. Their site was built from a template that didn’t fit their business. They were charged extra for things they assumed were included. They paid a monthly fee for “maintenance” that nobody could describe. And once the project was done, they couldn’t get anyone on the phone.
I’d like to report that the industry fixed itself. It mostly didn’t. The same problems now show up in more sophisticated forms.
The 2026 version of the same story
The owners I meet now have usually been burned in more sophisticated ways:
- The report full of green arrows. Impressions up, engagement up, sessions up. Revenue flat. Nobody can connect the two.
- Five vendors and no owner. A web firm, an ads specialist, an SEO contractor, a social freelancer. Each one does their piece. Nobody is responsible for whether the pieces add up.
- The retainer that grows while results don’t. More hours, more deliverables, same pipeline.
- The content flood. Forty blog posts a month that read like they were written by someone who has never met a customer, because they weren’t.
The common thread is the same as it was in 2011, though I didn’t see it clearly then.
What I got wrong in 2011
In 2011 I thought the problem was skill. Bad code, bad design, people who didn’t know what they were doing. Some of it was.
But the bigger problem was accountability. You can hire talented people and still get burned if every one of them is measured on their own piece and nobody is measured on the result. A beautiful website that doesn’t produce leads isn’t a design failure. It’s a business failure that nobody was assigned to prevent.
That’s the thing I built Seafoam to fix.
What I’d want you to ask before you hire anyone
If you’ve been burned before, here’s what I’d ask the next firm you talk to, including us:
- “How will we know if this worked, in dollars?” If the answer is about traffic or engagement, keep asking.
- “Who is accountable for the whole result?” You want a name, not a department.
- “What will you look at before you recommend anything?” If they have a proposal before they understand your business, you’re looking at a playbook with your logo on it.
- “What happens if it doesn’t work?” A good partner can tell you what they’ll measure, when they’ll know, and what they’ll change.
- Notice what they talk about. If the conversation is mostly about their services and not much about your customers, that tells you how the work will go.
How we run Seafoam now
We diagnose before we prescribe. Every engagement starts with a look at what’s actually happening with your customers, your funnel, and your numbers.
There’s one accountability line. The person in your first strategy interview is the same person at your annual strategic reset. No handoffs to an account manager you’ve never met.
And we report in dollars, not dashboards.
The 2011 version of me signed off that post with our phone number and a promise that we were “always here.” I’d write it differently today: we’ll show you the math, and you can decide.
Nikki Bisel, Founder & CEO
See how we work and what makes us different.