A Client Handed Me a Complete Mess, Here's What I Did in the First Week

The client's words on the discovery call: "we don't really know what's in there anymore." Three agencies over four years, two in-house marketing ops hires who'd both left, and a GTM container with over 80 tags, roughly a third of which nobody could explain the purpose of.

The instinct in that situation is to start fixing things immediately — something's obviously broken, just dig in. I didn't, and that restraint was the single most valuable thing I did in week one.

What I actually did, in order

• Day 1-2: inventory only, no changes. Every tag, trigger, and variable in GTM exported to a spreadsheet with status marked unknown.
• Day 2-3: cross-reference against live network traffic for a week of real sessions, flagging tags that fire but send data nowhere live, or fire to an endpoint that no longer exists.
• Day 3-4: interview whoever's still around, even peripherally, about anything they remember — a half-remembered reason beats no reason.
• Day 5: present the inventory back to the client as a decision document, not a fix. Each item gets a recommendation: keep, investigate, kill.
• Week 2 onward: only start removing or fixing things the client has explicitly signed off on, one category at a time, with before/after data checks.

The fastest way to make an inherited mess worse is to start cleaning before you know what you're looking at.

What the inventory actually found

Of the 80-plus tags, about 20 were firing to vendor accounts that had been cancelled a year earlier — silently failing, costing nothing, but adding load to every page. Another dozen were duplicate conversion pixels from two different agencies who'd each set up the same integration without checking what was already there, double-counting a chunk of their reported conversions the whole time.

None of that would have surfaced if I'd started with "let's fix the thing you called me about," which was a GA4 discrepancy that turned out to be a symptom of the duplicate pixels, not its own separate bug. The inventory is slower than diving in, and it's also the only way to actually understand what you're changing before you change it. Every client who's handed me a mess has eventually thanked me for the week that felt, to them, like nothing was happening.