How to Scale Agency with White Label WordPress Developers

Starting the agency feel great – but when you find product-market fit it’s time to scale and do the best part of business – make money. However, it’s not as simple as it may sound in the beginning. A lot of agencies tend to live in the same size and revenue for years. Let’s see how this works.

Why Agencies Struggle to Scale

The economics of agency business is not too complicated. You need to find a client, deliver everything you’ve promised and try to get work from the same client again. Imagine you’re landing a client who need to update his website because it’s not performing well in PPC or SEO.

I often see how agencies give an estimate based on hours ex: 200 hours. Then they confirm this estimate with the in-house developer or freelancer. For a while – everything looks fine, until project starts. Turns out 200 hours does not mean 5 weeks. Here is realistic timeline:

• 3 weeks of work,
• 2 weeks of waiting feedback from client,
• 1 week of work,
• 2 weeks of feedback from client,
• 1 week of work,
• 1 month of waiting until you can finally launch the project

These 200 hours turned 5 week project into 12 week project. If you have in-house developer – you’re paying for 3 month of work, not 2, not 1.5 – three. This drains margins severely if you don’t have 2 more projects running in parallel on the same pace.

And even if you do have 2 project in parallel running – the pace is never the same, some clients move quicker – some slower so work accumulates and you have more work that needs to be done asap than your dev can actually process. In this situation you can:

• Extend deadline with client and lose some margin
• Outsource the work and lose some margin because you were expecting in-house devs to handle this

Even if you work with freelancers and have a pool of befriended freelancers – you need to hope that their schedule and your deadline will match.

What Is White Label WordPress Development

White label wordpress development is basically an outsourced website development, when client thinks that your subcontractor is your employee and part of your agency. This term also usually means that white-label contractor get a retainer fee or project fee – depends on your contract.

Ideal terms for agencies is always pay % of what they invoice to client, so every transaction means profit – this is also well known as project based fee. The amount of hours spent by white-label partner does not affect the project fees, which saves you from unexpected hourly bill.

Benefits of White Label Developers

Lower Costs

Comparing to in-house team – when you have a payroll – fixed-price white label development has lower costs in 9 out of 10 situations. Simply because you stop paying the moment the contract is finished and you’re always paying less than you make.

Faster Delivery

Comparing to in-house team where each task has it’s queue – white-label development teams like Codelibry tend to have more manpower so when new “urgent” things comes up – you don’t reprioritise the tasks – you are getting 2+ tasks done in the same time which can only increase your monthly revenue and profits.

Access to Expertise

When you have in-house hire – you’re looking for a person who can cover variety of tasks related to your agency and common client’s requests. When you have specific issue the expertise of your employee may not be enough. White-label development partner on the other hand can add the missing expertise point to fullill your needs on project without on-going costs

How White Label Partnerships Work

Most cases: NDA supports full security of work-related queries between you and your white-label parter. You can confirm or decline portfolio showcase, mentioning client’s name etc.

How your client will know that it’s white-label contractor you’re using for the project, if the email says @your-agency-name.com ?

Another thing that with outsource – you’re managing things in spreadsheets, google docs – something that is difficult to support. White-label partnership usually means full integration: your tools, your task managers fully used by white-label partner according to your in-house requirements.

It means:

• Use your messenger for in-team communication: ex: Slack

• Use your notetakes that is synced into mutual database
• Move tasks and assign in your task manager

Whatever is being done – for your client nothing raises the outsourcing flag.

Common Mistakes When Scaling marketing agency

1. Hiring wrong people
2. Hiring full time, when you don’t have steady workflow
3. Paying hourly when outsourcing
4. Ignore NDA
5. Ignoring SOPs creation
6. Don’t align in-house teams with outsource teams

How to Choose the Right White Label Partner

Have the call where you set expectation. Every agency has unique workflow and sometimes they does not match at all.

Try with a small project

Prepare briefs and SOPs

Update brief after first project together

Try 2-3 projects before making final call – if after 3 projects things are not working well enough – it’s time to consider new white-label partner. But don’t stop trying after first difficulties as first project should be good in terms of results, but you can work on the processes.

I hope this makes sense and will help you to scale agency without falling in common traps that drain your budget and prevent from scaling.