Every week you delay a decision, your competitors aren’t waiting. Your customers aren’t waiting. The calendar certainly isn’t waiting.
I’ve seen it happen too many times: a brand knows they need a new website, or they know their email program is underperforming, or their ad spend isn’t delivering. They’ve done the research. They’ve had the conversations. They’re planning to make a move… just not yet.
And then something happens, whether it’s Q4 arises, a competitor enters the market, or a pandemic hits, and they’re scrambling. Or worse, they’re watching as competitors capture the demand they could have had.
This isn’t a pitch to rush into something you’re not ready for. But if you’ve already identified a problem and you’re sitting on the decision, it’s worth understanding what that delay is actually costing you.
The Math on Waiting
Let’s say your website converts at 1.5% and you know it should be performing at 2.5% or higher. You’ve identified the issues: slow load times, clunky mobile experience, and outdated design that doesn’t reflect your brand. You know a website redesign would help.
But you delay. You’ll get to it next quarter. Or after this busy season. Or when things calm down.
Here’s what that delay looks like:
If your site gets 50,000 visitors a month and your average order value is $75, that 1% conversion gap means you’re leaving roughly $37,500 on the table every month. Over six months of “waiting for the right time,” that’s $225,000 in revenue you didn’t capture.
And that’s just the direct cost. It doesn’t account for the customers who bounced and bought from a competitor instead, customers you may never get back.
The Q4 Trap
For many brands, Q4 is the biggest revenue opportunity of the year. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday shopping – this is when demand peaks.
Here’s what I see every year: brands reach out in August wanting to launch a new site before Black Friday. Or they want to overhaul their email flows. Or finally get serious about paid media.
By then, it’s often too late. A website migration done right takes 10-16 weeks. Email flows need time to build, test, and optimize. Paid campaigns need runway to gather data and improve performance.
If you want to be ready for Q4, the decisions need to happen by summer. Waiting until you can “feel” the peak season approaching usually means you’ve already missed the window.
What Acting Looks Like
We worked with adidas Combat Sports on a website migration from WooCommerce to Shopify. They came to us knowing their current site was holding them back: slow load times, technical issues, clunky product management. The catch? They needed to launch before Black Friday, which gave us just 10 weeks.
It was a tight timeline, but they made the call and committed. We ran a structured sprint process with weekly standups, mapped every feature from WooCommerce to Shopify, and launched on schedule.
The results of that Black Friday:
- 127% year-over-year revenue growth
- 71% increase in orders
- 26% boost in conversion rate
They could have waited. They could have said, “Let’s do it after the holidays.” But that would have meant another Q4 on a broken platform, and $$$ left on the table.
Read the Case Study
What Waiting Looks Like
Compare that to another brand we spoke with last year. They’d been talking about a redesign for over a year. Their site was slow, their conversion rate was below industry benchmarks, and they knew it. Every quarter, they pushed the project. They were busy. The timing wasn’t right. They couldn’t trust their gut that the investment would pay off.
They finally kicked off the project in late October, too late to launch before Black Friday. They spent their highest-traffic season on a site they knew was underperforming, watching conversion rates that could have been 20-30% higher with the improvements they’d already identified.
The revenue they lost during that single holiday season would have more than covered the cost of the redesign. And they knew it. They just didn’t act in time.
It’s Not Just Websites
This pattern plays out across every channel:
Email and SMS: Every month without optimized lifecycle flows – welcome series, abandoned cart, post-purchase – is a month of revenue leaking out of your business. These aren’t campaigns that need constant reinvention. Once they’re built, they work around the clock. But they can’t work if they don’t exist.
Paid media: Waiting to fix underperforming campaigns means continuing to waste spend. And if you’re waiting to “scale up for Q4,” remember that algorithms need time to learn. A campaign launched in November won’t perform as well as one that’s been optimizing since August.
CRO: Every day your checkout has unnecessary friction, your product pages lack trust signals, or your mobile experience frustrates users, you’re paying for traffic that doesn’t convert. The gap between your current conversion rate and your potential conversion rate is a daily cost, whether you see it on a line item or not.
How to Know If You’re Stalling
A few questions to ask yourself:
Have you identified a problem, but keep pushing the start date? There’s a difference between thoughtful planning and avoidance. If you’ve done the research, gotten the proposals, and you’re still “thinking about it” months later, that’s a stall.
Are you waiting for a “better time”? There’s rarely a perfect moment. There’s always a product launch, a busy season, an internal reorganization, a budget cycle. The brands that grow are the ones that start anyway.
Is fear of disruption driving the delay? Redesigns, migrations, and new campaigns do require effort. But the short-term disruption almost always pays off if the underlying work is sound. Staying comfortable on a broken system isn’t actually comfortable, it’s expensive.
The Real Cost of Waiting
The cost of waiting isn’t just the revenue you miss. It’s the compound effect:
- The customers who bought from a competitor and now have a relationship with them
- The data you didn’t collect that would inform better decisions today
- The momentum you didn’t build heading into your most important season
- The internal confidence that erodes when you keep pushing things off
Every month you delay, you’re not standing still. You’re falling behind because your market isn’t waiting for you.
Moving Forward
If you’ve been sitting on a decision, here’s my challenge: put a date on it. Not “sometime next quarter.” An actual date.
What would need to be true to move forward by that date? What information are you missing? What stakeholder needs to be aligned? What’s the real blocker, and is it actually a blocker, or just discomfort with change?
The best time to start was probably six months ago. The second-best time is now.
