White Labeling: The Revenue Multiplier Nobody's Talking About

We white labeled our branding and web process to other agencies for years, but 2023, my last year at Lawson House, is when we really saw the explosion, it added over half a million dollars in revenue. Here's what it actually is (and what it's not), why it works so well, and exactly how to implement it in your own business so you can scale without hiring more people or chasing clients one at a time.

Transcript

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If you are not currently white labeling your signature offer, you might be leaving a lot of money on the table. In today's episode, I want to talk about what white labeling is, what it's not, and help you potentially implement this in your own business. Why? Because white labeling brings down your cost per bead significantly, increases your hourly rate as an agency because you're not having to do so much client back and forth or maintain the emotional side of the client relationship, and you're able to scale with partners who don't currently offer what your expertise is. I'm so excited to get into this with you. But if you're wondering, was this just something we did on the side, I want to paint a picture for you. In my last year at Lawson House, it was 2023, it was my last full year, white labeling added over half a million dollars in revenue to our business. So when I say this worked really well, this helped us scale to that seven-figure mark. We still were doing what we were best at. We actually were bringing our process into other businesses. That's the whole point. But it allowed us to scale so much farther and faster than we ever thought possible. So let's first talk about what white labeling is and what it's not. White labeling is not a partnership in the traditional sense. Most agencies, and you might have brought these into your own business, have two types of partnerships. And I want to talk about what those are. One is there's kind of the mashup, right? So you've got um, if you think about HOCAS and free people, right? Two separate brands, but I can buy my HOCAS from free people and they're in cool colorways and really unique styles that I can only get at free people. Awesome. That's a really great brand partnership where my shoes cost the same, but I'm getting really cool brands working together to offer something unique. In a B2B sense, this might be like, hey, this copywriting firm and this website development firm actually come together to put together the signature offer where you get best of both worlds for the same price as you would normally. Then there's more of the referral partner. And this is the second partnership that most people think white labeling is. When I tell them, you know, we white label a lot, this is what they think we're doing. So somebody comes into a PR agency and they say, hey, we also need a website. The PR agency then might say, Great, you should go work with our partners at Lessen House. This is actually a referral partner and is not white labeling. There's two contracts. So anytime there's two contracts, you're in a partnership and you're not purely white labeling. I'm not a fan of this because it actually gives the client pause and makes them say, huh, what's most important in our budget? I don't like this type of partnership most of the time because you end up being competitors, even though you're trying to be partners. It was this realization that led me to love white labeling so much. Essentially, white labeling is when you take your signature offer. So for us to start, it was branding. We had a really defined process, we had really clear deliverables. Our team could execute it in any kind of situation, whether we were under our brand or somebody else's. I took that to people who were not currently offering branding. Think social media agencies, PR agencies, website only, people who really struggled to offer the branding side and it was decreasing the value of their signature offer. I would come to them and say, Hey, we offer branding. I would love to work with you. And they're like, Yeah, yeah, we've got a million referral partners. And I'm like, no, listen, I'm actually gonna wholesale our brand identity process. You can mark it up as much as you want, one contract. So now people are gonna stop saying, Well, I guess we have to do the branding first and then we'll come back to you. You get to bundle it all in together. No overhead on your part, no extra people added to your team. You don't have to build out a process. You don't have to pay for the project management tool. You just mark it up. And now instead of saying, hey, I would love for you to send me business, you have actually created a consistent revenue stream for your new partner. White labeling at its simplicity is essentially when you take your signature offer and you wholesale it to another organization so that they can sell it at a markup, make money under one contract, and you still make money for your services. Now, at this point in the talk track, normally agency owners are like, why would I mark it down? I should just give it to them at my rate and they can sell it, sure. But most of the time, you are trying to sell your offer for exactly what the market will bear, right? So we were kind of at the getting to the higher end of what people would pay for brand identity in our suite of agencies. And we realized that if we marked this down, we would allow our partners to be able to mark it up more. We wanted them to make a lot of money too. And so in this process, we were like, we don't want to pay for the lead. We want you to bring us your clients, all of them. So we're willing to take a little bit of a haircut on what we will charge because we want you to make more money, because we want you to send us more leads. Remember, I was all about the lead gen. If there was one thing I was focused on, it was the value of leads. I was a lot less concerned with whether or not we can make an extra $500 on a brand and a lot more concerned with, are you going to send me clients long term? This paid out in spades for us. People thought it was such a cool idea. They were like, oh my gosh, I thought I was going to have to hire a full-time graphic designer next. And typically what happened is they were like, what else do you white label? We created a whole suite of white label offerings that we were able to implement into these other agencies. We would take care of everything from the project management all the way through the execution, but we didn't have to take the nasty phone calls. We didn't have to handle, well, now this client is getting divorced, so we're postponing this project. We had our partner company or our partner agency handling all of that. They were in charge of making sure that the client was happy and taken care of and felt really supported. Our job was just to come in and execute. I also want you to recognize this. Every lead costs you something. It costs you money and time to create content, or if you're paying an outbound agency or if you're running ads, you have a cost per lead, even if they're just referrals. You have a cost per lead in your time and your energy and sometimes in your cash. You need to look at white labeling as something that is going to decrease that cost per lead because you have somebody else running lead gen on your behalf. It is an exponential value add to your business. Okay, so now that I've convinced you that this is the best thing ever, let's talk about how to implement it into your business. So, first I want you to start by defining what is your signature offer that you want to white label. I don't want you to just be a white label agency. Those don't work well when you're like, I'm gonna white label every offer that I have ever had. When I say we put together an offer suite for white label, we were really specific about the things we had a clear process on. We had clear deliverables, we had tested the pricing, it worked really well. We had tons of case studies. We started with branding and website, but we eventually moved into we could also do PDF creation, slide deck creation. Eventually we could do things like launch 38. These were all products that we had such a clear defined process around. I know I keep saying that, but it was that was the piece that made it something we could potentially white label. Why? Because white labeling requires you to come in and say, we can do this in our sleep. We're going to take you through a process. This doesn't need to take up a ton of time. You don't want to derail the timeline for somebody else's client. It needs to be something you are so good at, you're so confident in. I know stuff comes up, but you need to make it something that you are so confident in and is so pressure tested that you know how to handle almost any situation that can be thrown at you. So for us, we started with branding. We eventually added on website, but we were really picky about the types of websites we would white label. You need to choose your signature offer that you can take into another business and execute it pretty much flawlessly. So when you think about different business models, if you build online courses, you need to make this like I can build out a seven-part course in this way, in this amount of days. Here's what it looks like. I can white label that for your clients. Um, if you're a copywriter, it can be here is my writing process. I can do blogs and I can do newsletters, and here's how I white label that into my clients' offerings. In this way, you are not asking your clients to burn any extra calories. You are saying, hey, sell this to your clients. You make money for doing nothing. I make money and I'm super happy. And your clients get more value. That is the trifecta you are trying to pitch to your clients. Now that you've got your signature offer in mind, let's move on to step two, which is setting clear expectations. You almost want to onboard your partner like you would a client and set expectations where you're asking questions. You want to be really clear. How do you want the client to know that I'm involved? What kind of title should we have? When do we escalate things to you? What kind of communication process do you have? These are all really important things to know because one, it might give you some red flags about working with them. If they're like, we respond to every client within 15 minutes, you're like, that doesn't work for me. Or if they're like, hey, um, I want you to escalate every single thing to me. Those might be some red flags to give you some hesitation and talk more openly with your partner about what this could actually look like. Because what you're trying to do is bring your level of expertise into somebody else's business who has essentially the same values you do, so that they know the client's going to be well taken care of and all of our standards are going to be met. That's why it's so important to address the standards. You just want to figure out what do you include in your contracts? What do we need to be aware of? And then you want to put together a partnership agreement that outlines here's what we're going to be doing, here's what's clear and expected. You also want to make sure you cover payment terms. So let's say your expectations are they sign a client, you're going to start work, you want to get paid in full. Well, the client might not have paid them in full yet. So they don't want to pay you yet. You need to address all those things before they happen. Just a good rule of thumb in life is to talk about the hard stuff before it gets hard. So before there's money, before it's tense, you want to make sure that you have a clear outline with your partners on how all this will go down. Okay, with these things in mind, your last step is how do you actually find partners? So I like to say that these come from your relationships. These aren't going to be people necessarily, we did run white label campaigns on this and we did have some success with that. But most of the time these are going to be from people in your networking circles. A lot of people ask me, how do you network as an agency owner? And when you go to these networking events, most of the time it's other agency owners. I was so frustrated when I would go to these networking events and I was like, everyone here is doing the same thing as me. And that's when I realized if I white label, I've got a room full of people I can actually sell to. And now we're talking about a situation where everybody can make money. And as long as I don't sound like I'm pitching an NLM, uh, because in the beginning it definitely did. It sounded super sketchy the way I talked about it. I was like, you can make money and I can make money. And they were like, what are you talking about? Once I got my talk track down, um, I really started to develop some of these relationships. And they started to also include some of their friends in the circle. They were like, hey, if somebody reached out and was like, Hey, do you know anybody who's looking for a job in branding? They'd be like, actually, you should talk to Susie. They can do this at scale. They can handle so many more projects than just adding one person to your team and they've got this whole process. I heard a couple people say that and come to me through that referral, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I was hoping would happen. You need to find a couple people that you can go to who don't offer your signature offer currently, and you need to tell them exactly what you're trying to do. Tell them what the pricing would look like, give them some time to noodle on it, and then leave it. This is not a sale you're trying to make tomorrow. You are trying to lay the groundwork for when they have a client come through their pipeline who you say, Oh my gosh, they're like, wait, I think Susie can help us with this. And that is the seed you're trying to plant. This is a slow burn, but long term, it will really pay out in terms of the amount of weeds people send you, the partners that you have, and the reputation that you get in the space with your partners. All right, before we wrap up, I want to cover one last thing. I get a lot of criticism for when I talk about this. People always tell me, what about building your own brand? I'm really trying to create a name for myself. I would so much rather take the client and then know it's me. Um, I just find that if I'm working on somebody else, I'm helping their brand grow and I'm not necessarily growing my own. Sure. And that's fine. Um, you that's gonna be really expensive. I found that I wanted to grow revenue more than I wanted to grow my reputation. I was a lot more concerned with growing that annual revenue number, that recurring revenue number. And I was really interested in any of the ways that I thought we could get there that weren't going to cost us an arm and a leg. But simultaneously, we were still doing a ton of revenue in our own business and in our own brand. We were working with our own clients, we were doing our own lead gen, we were growing this, but most of the time, our white labeling gave us the revenue freedom to go and try things and experiment with new lead gen to grow our reputation even more. I say this on almost every other episode. Um, money can't solve all your problems, but it can solve a lot of them. This will help you fix a lot of things in your business, bring on more people, get better at what you're doing. And by the way, these people were never going to be your clients anyway. They are going to go work with your partner. They like your partner. So they were never going to be people who were in play for you. Now you get a piece of the pie. Now you get to do what you're going to do best, and you can work on scaling your agency instead of trying to always be picking off one client at a time or messing things up with really complicated partnership contracts. If you are listening to this and you are stuck on step one, you don't know what your signature offer would be, you have no idea who would buy this as a partnership and how you would talk about it. I would love to chat with you. Go to susiecoli.com. You can find a time for us to chat and we can look at your business, discuss potential partnerships. I can recommend what that would look like and just be a source for you on this topic. I love talking about white labeling. It gave me so much freedom in my business, and I hope that it does for yours as well. Thanks so much for tuning in and listening. Until next time, sell well.