Valiant 3: repositioning an agency from social media to sports

The short version

Valiant 3 had quietly become a different company. They were representing athletes, producing events, and running nonprofit fundraising, but their website still described a general social media marketing agency and led with a blog.

We rebuilt the site around what they actually do now. Seven weeks from the first call to launch.

The situation

I got on a call in June expecting to talk about a website. What came out was a repositioning.

Beth, Alexis, and Frankie described a business built around sports: athlete brand management, live events, celebrity golf classics, nonprofit development. The kind of work where the client list includes names people recognize.

Then I looked at the site. Five real pages and 221 blog posts about LinkedIn tactics and the best times to post on social media. Nothing on it said “we represent athletes.” Nothing showed the events they run. If you landed there after meeting them, you would have come away thinking you had the wrong company.

The gap between the two was the whole problem. They were selling one thing in the room and another thing on the internet.

What we decided

Kill the blog. This was the call I pushed hardest on, and it is the one most agencies would have resisted. Two hundred and twenty-one posts represent years of effort, and deleting them feels like throwing away work.

But the blog was answering questions their new buyer does not ask. An athlete choosing representation does not want a post about Instagram Stories. They want to see who else you represent and what events you have pulled off. So the blog came out and a case-study section went in. Social proof instead of content marketing.

Build the roster before they can use it. Alexis wanted to feature represented athletes, but representation agreements land one at a time and you cannot publish a name before the ink is dry. So we built the roster system now and gated it, so names can be switched on individually as approvals come in, without anyone touching code.

Treat the nonprofit work as evidence. Valiant 3 does real fundraising work with the Bettis foundation and others. On the old site that lived in blog posts. Now the events they run are on the site as proof of capability, and the two Jerome Bettis events link to the foundation’s own pages rather than duplicating them.

The turns

The biggest one was a taste question I got wrong at first. The brief was “professional and sports-focused, not fluffy.” My first direction was still too soft. It took a round of feedback and a set of reference sites before the visual language landed somewhere that reads like sports rather than like a marketing agency that happens to have sports clients.

The second was mundane and mattered more than it sounds. Every one of those 221 blog posts had a live URL that people and search engines still pointed at. Deleting a blog without handling that is how a migration quietly costs a business its search traffic. Every old URL redirects, so nothing anyone bookmarked or linked to is broken.

Where it landed

The site now says what the business is in the first three words. The roster is ready when they are. The blog is gone and nobody misses it.

WordPress is gone too, along with the server it ran on, which takes their hosting cost to roughly nothing and removes a box that needed patching.