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The first month decides the rest
Projects rarely fail at the design stage. They fail in the first four weeks, when nobody agreed what success looks like, the agency guessed at the business instead of asking, and the client assumed work had started while the agency waited for materials. Knowing what a competent first month looks like lets you spot the difference between a slow start and a bad one, and gives you something to hold the other side to. This applies whether you are buying a brand identity or a website.
Week one is questions, not designs
A good agency spends the opening week interrogating your business, not presenting concepts. Who buys from you and why, who you lose to and why, what a sales conversation actually sounds like, what has already been tried. If a logo arrives in week one, that is a warning: it was drawn before anyone understood what it has to do, because the identity process runs from discovery to a working system rather than from brief to logo. Agreeing with everything you say is the same warning in a different form. A supplier executes what you asked for; a partner tells you when what you asked for will not work.
What you have to supply
Most delays are on the client side, and they are predictable. Access to the people who actually know things, not just the marketing contact. Existing files, however messy. The customer list or at least a description of the segments. Honest answers about what has not been working. And one person empowered to decide, because a project routed through a committee for every approval adds weeks nobody budgeted. Assemble this before the kickoff and you buy back a fortnight.
The brief is written down or it does not exist
By the end of week two you should be holding a document that states the objective, the audience, the scope, what is explicitly out of scope, and how the result will be judged. Both sides sign it. Everything argued about later is argued against that page. Verbal agreement at a kickoff feels efficient and is the single most expensive shortcut in the business, which is why writing the brief properly is worth the afternoon it takes.
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Somewhere in weeks two and three you should see positioning work: who the brand is for, what it claims, what it refuses. This is the part clients are most tempted to skip because it produces no images, and it is the part that determines whether the images are any good. An agency that moves straight to visuals is producing decoration you will be asked to judge on taste. If you cannot state your position in a sentence by the end of the month, the positioning work has not happened yet.
Direction, not a finished answer
Late in the first month you should see routes rather than one polished proposal. Two or three directions, each with a rationale tied back to the brief, each genuinely different rather than the same idea in three colours. Your job at that review is not to pick what you like. It is to judge which one does what the brief says, which is a harder question and the reason the brief exists. Expect to be asked for a decision, in writing, with a date attached.
Signals that something is wrong
Silence for a week. A different account manager at every call while the people who pitched have vanished, which is the same warning sign that matters when choosing a brand identity agency. Work that could have been made for any company in your sector. Questions you already answered being asked again, which means nothing was written down. And scope drifting upward in conversation rather than through a change note. None of these are fatal in week one, and all of them predict how the remaining months will go. Raise them immediately, because agencies correct course far more readily in month one than in month four.
Written by
Idennex
Strategy-first agency, Istanbul