Choosing an IT partner for web and software growth is a decision about what happens after the launch. A project contract fits a closed scope. A partner contract fits the month after, when the site, the application, and acquisition still need an owner.
What to put in the brief
Which systems are in scope: the public site, a web app, ads, SEO, the form-to-CRM path. A partner who only holds one of these can still be right, if the handover to the others is written. Three vendors and no shared measurement leave the company repeating the same brief.
Name the monthly boundary. Which changes are included, which are a new project, who approves them, and how an outage is reached. “Ongoing support” without that list becomes every request, billed as if it were planned.
Ownership and cover
Code lives in a repository the company can access. Domain, hosting, analytics, and the ads account are company accounts. The partner has access and a second person who can deploy. A single login is not a partnership. It is a dependency.
Ask how a change of partner works before the work starts. The exit is a checklist with a date: accounts, code, content, and the last report. Visibility that only exists inside one vendor’s tenancy has to be bought again.
What growth means here
Growth is not a promise of traffic. It is a system in which enquiries are measured, pages match search or ads intent, and software changes do not break that path. The partner’s report should say what changed and what the sales team did with the enquiries. A chart of sessions does not answer that.