How We Work Together: What to Expect From Start to Live
Starting with a new agency is uncomfortable in a specific way: you have handed over something that matters, and for a while you cannot see what is happening to it. This guide exists so you always know where you are, what happens next, and what is waiting on you.
Two things run in parallel and are easy to confuse, so they are separated here:
- Getting your account working — your platform, your contacts, your automations. Typically 14 to 18 business days.
- Building your website — structure, copy, build, review, launch. Longer, and paced almost entirely by how fast drafts come back.
If you are doing both, they overlap. The account work starts first and finishes first.
For a week-by-week view of the first track, read Your First 30 Days. This guide covers both tracks and what each one needs from you.
Part One — Getting your account working
Stage 1 · Setup — the first few days
We create your account, install the right starting configuration for your industry, and connect your domain and email so messages sent from the system actually arrive.
What you see: your login, and an invitation to set your password. What we need: your business details, your logo, and access to your domain. About: two to three days once we have those.
Stage 2 · Onboarding — the next week or two
The substantial part. Your contacts come in, your pipeline is built to match how you actually sell, your calendar connects, forms and booking pages go up, and the automatic follow-ups are built and tested.
What you see: things start appearing — a booking page, a form, a first automated email arriving in a test. What we need: decisions, mostly. How you want enquiries handled, what your follow-up should say, which of your services need their own booking type. About: seven to ten working days.
This is the stage where clients most often feel the quiet, because much of the work has no visible surface until it is finished. If you want a mid-stage look, ask — we would rather show you a half-built thing than have you wondering.
Stage 3 · Training — a few days
We walk you and your team through the parts you will use daily. Usually recorded, so you can rewatch rather than remember.
What you see: a walkthrough, and short videos you keep. What we need: an hour or so of the right people's time. About: three to five days, scheduled around you.
Stage 4 · Live
Your account is doing real work. We move to a regular rhythm: a monthly check-in, and a quarterly review to look back and re-plan.
Typically 14 to 18 business days from signing to fully operational, when inputs come back promptly. The single biggest variable is not our capacity — it is how quickly the things we ask for arrive. The onboarding checklist is the fastest way to move that along.
Part Two — Building your website
Five phases. Each ends with something you look at and respond to, which is deliberate: it means you are never more than one phase away from being able to change direction cheaply.
Phase 1 · Structure
We map every page and draw the layout of each one as grey boxes — no colours, no photographs, no final wording. Just what goes where.
What you see: a wireframe document. What we need: whether the pages are right and whether the order makes sense.
Grey boxes look unfinished on purpose. Reacting to layout is far easier when you are not distracted by colour, and changing it here costs minutes rather than days.
Phase 2 · Content
We draft the words for every page from your existing material and our conversations.
What you see: copy drafts, one document per page, with comments enabled. What we need: corrections, missing facts, and the handful of things only you can supply — which client logos may be shown, which testimonials can be attributed, exact service descriptions.
Anything we do not know is left as a visible placeholder. We would rather show you a gap than invent something plausible.
Phase 3 · Build
Pages get assembled. The homepage comes first so you can react to the look before the rest follows it.
What you see: a preview link, homepage first. What we need: your reaction to the homepage. Everything else is built to match it.
Phase 4 · Review and polish
The whole site, reviewed together. Revisions, final brand assets, and checks on phones, tablets, links and forms.
What you see: a complete preview site. What we need: one consolidated list of changes.
One list works far better than a stream of separate messages — it gets turned around faster and nothing gets missed between them.
Phase 5 · Launch
Forms and booking wired to your CRM, measurement switched on, your domain pointed at the new site, then post-launch checks.
What you see: your site, live. What we need: your written go-ahead. Nothing goes public without it.
How long? Genuinely dependent on you. The build time is predictable; the review time is not. Sites where drafts come back within a few days finish in a fraction of the time of sites where they sit for two weeks. We will give you dates as each phase starts, and we will tell you when a date has moved and why.
Who does what
| You | Symphony Core | |
|---|---|---|
| What the business does and who it is for | ✓ | |
| Photographs, logos, brand files | ✓ | |
| Facts, prices, service details | ✓ | |
| Which clients and testimonials may be named | ✓ | |
| Writing the pages | ✓ | |
| Layout, build, forms, automation | ✓ | |
| Hosting, uptime, backups | ✓ | |
| Approving anything before it goes public | ✓ | |
| Deciding what gets built next | ✓ | |
| Sizing and scheduling new requests | ✓ |
How we handle new requests
Ideas will come up mid-build — that is normal and welcome. What we will not do is quietly absorb them, because that is how launch dates slip without anyone deciding they should.
So: we note it, size it, and confirm in writing what it does to the schedule before starting. Sometimes the answer is "that is an hour, we will fold it in." Sometimes it is "that is a week, and it moves your launch." Either way you decide with the cost visible.
How to reach us
Email [email protected] for anything you need. It gets tracked, and anyone available can pick it up — which matters more than it sounds, because a message to one person's phone is only visible to one person.
If we have a chat group with you, keep it for things that genuinely cannot wait: something broken, a date moving, something needed today. Everything else is better in email where it becomes a tracked item rather than a message someone has to remember.
Full details are in How to Get Support.
What slows projects down
Said plainly, because every one of these is avoidable:
- Drafts sitting unreviewed. The most common cause by a distance. A day's delay on a review is a day on the end date.
- Missing decisions. Not big ones — small specific ones. Which six logos. Whether a client may be named. What the cancellation terms are.
- Changes arriving in pieces. Fifteen separate messages take longer to action than one list, and something gets lost.
- Requests arriving outside the tracked channel. If it only exists in a chat thread, it only exists for whoever was in that thread.
- Approvals waiting on one person. If someone else can sign off, tell us who.
Key Takeaways
- Account setup takes 14 to 18 business days; the website runs on its own track and is paced by review turnaround.
- Each phase ends with something to look at, so you can change course cheaply.
- Nothing goes public without your written approval.
- Placeholders mean we do not know something yet — never that we forgot.
- One consolidated list of changes beats a stream of messages.
- Email is the channel; chat is for genuine urgency.