Valiant 3: from a website I inherited to the agency it actually describes

The short version

I have run Valiant 3’s website since 2022. In that time the agency quietly turned into a different company, and the site did not.

By 2026 they were selling athlete representation and event production in the room, and selling social media tips on the internet. We rebuilt it around the business they actually run now.

The migration

I met Beth Vietmeier in the summer of 2022 through Matt Blocki, doing unrelated work for a wealth management firm. Within a month she had handed me two websites: her agency’s, and the Jerome Bettis foundation she also runs.

Both were built in Webflow by a developer who was no longer involved. The sites worked, but nobody at the agency could meaningfully change them and the person who could was gone. So the first job was not a redesign. It was getting them onto something the team could run.

I rebuilt both in WordPress in July 2022 and kept the existing design rather than relitigating it. That was the right call at the time and it is worth being honest about what it was: a platform move, not a rethink. The site still said what the old site said.

Four years of running it

Then came the part that does not photograph well.

Service pages when the offering shifted. Blog images that came through wrong. Staff coming and going on the team page. The annual rhythm of a business that runs events. Four years of small things, none of which belong in a case study on their own.

I am including it because it is the reason the rest of this story exists. When Beth emailed asking what a facelift would cost, I could ask for a call about the whole business instead, and actually get one. That is not a move that works from a standing start. A stranger who has read your homepage does not get to tell you your positioning is off. Someone who has been inside the site for four years does. You do not get that conversation in month one. You earn it in the boring middle.

The repositioning

It started with an email that was going to cost me money.

In June 2026 Beth sent over three things. Go ahead and delete Jerome’s Blue and Gold Classic site, because they were folding it onto the foundation’s events tab. Frankie had new copy and photos for the foundation site. And last: they were rebranding Valiant 3 slightly and wanted a facelift for the current site, so how much would that run?

Read that plainly and it is one site being retired and the smallest possible version of another being priced. I had been running the Blue and Gold Classic site on a monthly for years, so the first line was recurring revenue walking out the door.

I did not send back a facelift quote. I asked for a call, because I had been meaning to talk to them about the sites anyway and I had other ideas. That call was the whole engagement.

On it, 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 I had been maintaining. 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.

Retire the blog. This one was decided before I said anything about it. Alexis asked the room what they wanted to do, and Beth answered straight away that she did not think they needed it going forward. They had been publishing weekly, mostly AI-written, and her own read was that it was not driving anything back to them.

So the question was never whether to stop. It was what goes in its place, and that is the part I had an opinion about. Those posts were 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 argument I made was about where that proof lives. They were already publishing this work on social, where it gets seen once and then it is gone. On the site it compounds: Google indexes it, AI models read it, and it is still there the next time someone looks them up. 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.

What I got wrong

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 thing 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. Static means the site loads faster than it ever did on WordPress, there is no login screen or plugin stack sitting there waiting to be patched, and there is no database that can fall over in the middle of an event week.

Four years in, I replaced the thing I built. That is not a knock on the 2022 work. It did its job for four years while the business found out what it wanted to be. The point of staying is that you are still there when the answer shows up.