🆆 🆃 🅵: One Penny Richer 🪙

The question every client (and franchisee) should ask at least once.

If I Had a Penny

We had just wrapped a website launch.

The client was happy. The team was happy. We were all on a call – the kind where you recap the wins, pop a metaphorical (or real) bottle, and feel genuinely good about what you built together.

And then the client asked: “Is there anything we can take as constructive criticism – anything that we can do to continue to foster the relationship into the future? How can you train us to be good clients for you?”

I paused.

And then I said, “If I had a penny for every time someone asked this question on a call like this, I would have exactly… one penny.”

Everybody laughed.

Then he said the thing that stopped me: the only reason he knew to ask that question was that it’s the question he wishes his franchisees would ask him. How can we be better franchisees for you?

He’d also have exactly one penny.

I told him I might put it on LinkedIn. He said go for it. So here we are – newsletter edition.

The WTF Moment: Your Website Has Too Many Stakeholders and Not Enough Conversations

Your website doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

You probably have people on your team managing certain parts of it – especially content. It might be touched by an SEO vendor, a PR team, a hosting provider, your IT department, and three different people who all have the login and differing opinions about what the most important feature of that website actually is.

That’s a lot of cooks. And most of them have never met each other.

The WTF moment isn’t that things go wrong. It’s that when they do, it’s completely avoidable – with one phone call, one shared document, one meeting where everyone understood what each partner handles and how their work affects everyone else’s.

We’ve had clients change their hosting without telling us. One week we’re doing monthly maintenance, the next we show up and the website just… isn’t there anymore. Not hacked. Not deleted. Just moved without warning. 

We’ve had SEO agencies working in the same CMS we manage, making changes that broke things we’d carefully built, because no one told either of us the other existed.

We’ve had projects stall for weeks because a decision was needed, and everyone assumed someone else would make it. And when no one does, decisions don’t just disappear – they happen anyway. By default, by whoever was around that day, or by whoever held the role at the time and then moved on, leaving the people who inherited the consequences with something they never actually chose.

None of this is malicious. It’s just what happens when communication fails.

What Makes Partnerships Work

I want to be clear: most of our clients are good clients. No, scratch that – they’re GREAT clients. This isn’t a complaint list. It’s more like the guide I wish existed – the one that my dear one-penny client, without knowing it, basically commissioned by asking the question in the first place.

The version for franchisees. The version for web clients. Same idea.

🗣️ Bring your partners to one table. 

If you have an SEO agency, a PPC team, a copywriter, and a web management agency, they should all be in a room together at least once. Not to compete. To understand each other. What your SEO team does affects our website performance. What we do affects their crawlability. Siloed partners create siloed problems.

⏱️ Make decisions when decisions are requested. 

A website project isn’t a passive experience. It requires your input at critical moments. A missed decision doesn’t pause the project – it redirects it in ways that are very hard to undo three months later, usually by someone who didn’t fully have the context.

📞 Tell us before you do something to the website. 

Thinking about changing hosting? New plugin installed? Tweaked some server settings? Gave a new hire admin access? Tell us. We’re not monitoring every click you make – we’re managing your website, which means surprises aren’t features. They’re fires.

💡 Leave room for strategy. 

If every hour in your retainer goes toward fixing bugs and reactive tasks, you’re paying for maintenance, not growth. The most valuable thing we can do for your website often happens before anything is built – in the thinking, the planning, the asking “why are we building this and what do we want it to do?” Squeezing every dollar toward execution is a fast way to stay stuck.

💬 Ask the uncomfortable question.

Not “what did we do wrong?” – that’s uncomfortable for everyone, and honestly, it puts us in an awkward spot. Telling a client that the three weeks it took to make a small decision derailed the next two months of the project is not a conversation anyone looks forward to.

But “how can we work better together going forward?” – that’s a different question. That one we can answer warmly and practically. It usually turns into a conversation about communication: whether a monthly one-hour meeting works for you, or whether two shorter bi-weekly check-ins would keep things moving better. Whether email communication is effective, or we need task dashboards with additional visibility into priorities and time allocation. There’s no wrong answer – but there is a big difference between no answer and the right one for your team.

The Franchise Mirror

The franchisor-franchisee relationship and the client-agency relationship have more in common than most people realize. Both run on trust, shared expectations, and a willingness to say things that feel a little uncomfortable to say.

The franchisors who build the strongest networks are usually the ones who’ve figured out how to create a feedback culture – where asking “how can I do better?” isn’t awkward, it’s just part of how they operate.

That same culture, applied to your vendor partnerships, is what separates a relationship that just maintains from one that actually grows.

My one-penny client figured that out on his own. His franchisees are lucky – whether they know it yet or not.

Warmly, 

Madalina “Penny for Your Thoughts” Iordache 

CEO at Bright Pink Agency

P.S. If your website relationship could use a reset – or a clearer starting point – our BrightStart plan is a strategic audit that maps exactly what your website needs and who should be doing what. Less guessing. More clarity. Fewer surprise hosting moves.

P.P.S. I’ve been at this long enough to know that the best client relationships don’t start with a great brief. They start with a great question.

Bright Pink who?

At Bright Pink Agency, we build high-performing franchise websites that attract more of the right leads. If your website isn’t working as hard as you are, let’s chat about getting your franchise website in shape. No fluff, no nonsense — just smart, strategic moves to help you grow.