Case Study: Rescuing a Financial Firm From Domain Lockout
Encompass Financial Partners' old domain was registered under an unresponsive vendor's account and weeks from expiring. Here's how Kairos got them onto a domain they own and a site that finally shows their credentials and process.
The client
Encompass Financial Partners is a financial planning and insurance advisory firm in Cary, NC, offering securities and advisory services through a MassMutual broker-dealer network. Their brand is built around the kitchen table — family, legacy, and financial education — and their old website was supposed to carry that story to prospective clients.
The problem: locked out of their own domain
A previous web developer had registered Encompass's domain under their own account, then went unresponsive. Encompass had no access to renew it, no access to the Squarespace account hosting the site behind it, and no way to reach the person who controlled either one. The registration was weeks from expiring — and once a domain lapses, it can be picked up by anyone. A firm with decades of client relationships was close to having its web presence simply disappear, through no fault of its own.
Even setting the lockout aside, the site itself wasn't doing its job. The About page duplicated the homepage almost word for word. The Events page referenced courses that no longer existed. And nowhere did a prospective client see the team's actual credentials, their process, or any real proof of who they were working with — the site told a warm story but gave no substance to back it up.
What we built
- A new site on a domain Encompass registered and owns outright — no dependency on any outside vendor
- Rebuilt page architecture: distinct Home, Services, Events, and Our Team pages, each doing one job instead of duplicating another
- Real team bios with credentials, replacing generic copy with something a prospective client can actually evaluate
- A state-by-state licensing and disclosures page, built to the standard a securities and insurance practice needs
- Copy rewritten end-to-end and packaged as a formal submission for the firm’s broker-dealer advertising review
- A spam-hardened contact form and inbound-email routing, plus standard security headers and full SEO/structured-data setup ahead of launch
The domain situation and the content problem got solved as one project rather than two, because they were really the same underlying issue: Encompass didn't control its own web presence, in either sense of the word. For what that kind of technical debt costs a growing business more broadly, see signs your business has outgrown its software.
The outcome
The domain was secured under Encompass's own account before the old registration could expire — the firm's web presence was never actually at risk of going dark. For the first time, Encompass controls its own domain and hosting independent of any outside vendor. The site itself now shows credentials, process, and services instead of duplicate pages and stale references, and the copy has been packaged and submitted for the firm's broker-dealer compliance review ahead of public launch.
How we approach this
Brad Walker has spent more than twenty years building and rescuing web presences for small businesses and regulated practices from his base in Wake Forest, NC. When a business doesn't control its own domain, hosting, or CMS access, that gets fixed first — before a single line of new copy gets written — because no redesign matters if the underlying account isn't actually the client's. From there, content gets built to survive whatever review process the client's industry requires, rather than getting written first and edited after a rejection. A related walkthrough of keeping credentials and access under your own control, generally, is in custom software security for small business.
Engagements are fixed price, with the scope agreed before development starts. You know what you are getting, what it costs, and when it lands.
Frequently asked questions
What happens if you don't own the domain your business website runs on?
You are one unresponsive email away from losing your web presence entirely. Whoever's account a domain is registered under controls whether it renews, where it points, and who can access it — if that's a past web developer or agency rather than the business itself, the business has no direct way to renew the registration, change the hosting, or even prove ownership if a dispute arises. The domain can lapse and get scooped up by someone else the day after it expires. The fix is registering (or transferring) every domain your business depends on under an account your own business controls, with your own contact information as the registrant.
What does it take to make a website compliant for a financial advisor?
It depends on the broker-dealer or registered investment advisor the advisor is affiliated with, but the review is generally about substantiation and required disclosures rather than design: every claim on the site needs to be something the firm can back up, testimonials and performance claims are heavily restricted, and licensing information typically needs to be listed by state. Most broker-dealers require the site's content to be submitted for advertising review before or shortly after launch. Building the copy with that review in mind from the start — rather than writing it first and editing it after a rejection — is what keeps the process from stalling a launch.
If your business doesn't fully control its own domain, hosting, or CMS, that is worth fixing before it becomes an emergency. Start the conversation. The first step is a discovery call to map exactly who controls what today.
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