Coding issues regarding loops, or wrong marketing strategies are easy to find on the web, with diagnostics of where is the error and what to do, but businesses? I'm forever curious. Again, I've watched shows like The Profit or Shark Tank where someone with common sense says "this is wrong because of A, B, C" and the owners are like What? no way. (unable to understand the wrong). The things I've seen also involve one to one person and entrepreneur programs where even the guy who brings the food says "hey that's wrong" (unrelated to the industry but... the fact is the wrong is obvious to everyone but the owner).
Case #1. A business owner introduced by a friend was having issues with his large multi location chef academy, so after some conversations I got in. The website was created from scratch, fast as a bullet. The content was created by me based on their stuff, great optimizations and after 1-2 months the search engine positions started showing impact on conversions. This continued over the year: more and more clicks, more emails, more students. I was also in charge of the pictures (been a photographer more years than a webmaster). So, the client was happy and never invested on advertising again. This continued over a set of 5 years+-. Later some people started talking to him about strategies, website redesign, etc. And so he started messing up, he was absolutely free to do as he wanted, no problem with me, after all he was the owner.
So, the content style changed both on the website and social networks. Traffic went down.
Then the picture style changed on web and social networks. Traffic went down more.
Then started paying for social network advertising. Traffic WAS UP! but almost zero conversions, no people signing up.
He was told getting rid of the website was a must, and so he did. He got a new website with things that appear as people scroll down, readers say they hate it.
Search engine results are gone, positioning gone, no redirects, didn't keep the urls or traffic.
Https gone, people who visit the website don't understand the warning (not secure) so they leave.
In the changing process hired some advertising on one of my websites for 2 transitional years, he got conversions, then stopped paying. Zero conversions.
And that's the short version. Each change they made ruined something more than the previous one. Stopped being kind with me, stopped inviting me to festivals (I was never interested, just assisted to few out of kindness and taking pics for the job). Our mutual friend told him "you ruined everything" and this turned into less business, then she explains to me "he is a difficult person, the kind of business owner who HATES being wrong and prefers to go down before admitting a mistake", it's not exactly an opinion, it's almost considered canon in his circle: he doesn't make mistakes, he doesn't apologizes.
I never insisted or tried to keep the client or to convince him, why? the proof was obvious and I was busy doing something else moving away from the business, so I didn't have any single motivation to stay there, after all he was a client, just a client, and I can't save him from his own ideas (something I learned years ago). So I never tried to sell anything to him.
Another case? same thing happened on the big company I worked for years. An external consultant entered the scene and started messing up everything. We went from 7K per day daily visits on several websites to 200 unique per day. The process took a few years, every stage was discussed and I would explain the risks, what would go wrong, each stage every-single-warning came true, and still they continued. The process involved a lot of people, and about 80% agreed on the whole thing being wrong, except the managers and the external consultant. They ended killing several of the websites keeping only one, ugly, slow, wordpress, little traffic, terrible conversions, finally a lot of people got fired, the managers are gone (not a single one left) and the external consultant is hated on different circles for ruining businesses. I could understand a lot of things allowing this to happen, but EVERY SINGLE stage made things worse... and still tried some more? I will never understand this.
