Starting a business is impossibly hard.
Here’s a secret hack I stumbled backward into that’ll make it infinitely easier and mitigate almost all your risk.
Ready? Set… Go!
When starting a business, it’s not enough to be amazingly good at what you’re selling (which is already hard enough to do on its own). You actually have to be good at business.
That’s marketing, fulfillment, ops, finance, management, communication, etc.
What if there was a way to outsource everything and focus on one step at a time?
There is! It’s called white labeling. If you’re unfamiliar, it means reselling someone else’s product/service as though that product/service is yours.
Before you throw up in your mouth, hear me out.
Solutions 8 is one of the top Google Ads agencies in the world. Ready for the ironic gut punch? Solutions 8 didn’t perform Google Ads services for most of its life as an agency. We were white labeling another agency.
Do you feel cheated? Let me ask you this: Why?
The service we were providing was stellar. I dare say we provided far superior service than the agency we were reselling could have imagined. They were too busy getting stuck in the weeds of doing the work. We were freed up to focus on our clients and be advocates for their success.
Mind you, this wasn’t some brilliant strategy I devised to help me build and scale my agency. I figured this out accidentally.
Google Ads was just too damn hard to run in house. I tried, I failed. So, I found the best agency I could afford and just started outsourcing to them.
They were super expensive, so I had practically no margins. I just marked them enough to ensure I wasn’t losing money. That didn’t bother me because, at the time, Google Ads wasn’t an important enough part of my business. I just offered it because clients expected it.
Then, something magical happened: The Google Ads arm of our business started massively outperforming every other service. Why? It was completely hands-off. We didn’t have to do anything but sign clients and lob them over the fence.
From there, we became the customers.
It was my business partner, John Moran, who first noticed this. I beat our heads against a wall, trying to make a “full-funnel” agency work. He kept bringing up the idea that we should focus on Google Ads. I still remember the line he used that finally convinced me: “I’ll take $1,000 a month to yell at [other agency].”
That was it. It made so much sense. We started raising our prices to be profitable (which was a lot easier since we now knew what we were doing) and slowly phased out all of our other services.
After a while, we outran the agency we were reselling. They couldn’t keep up with our growth and forced us to build an in-house team.
Here’s the thing: it was easy since we now had a massively successful business and knew what we needed to do.
I’d recommend this approach to anyone looking to get started in business.
Skip the hard part of building a business and start reselling other people’s stuff. Try a few different services at once, and just see what sticks!
Have you had any experiences on either side of a white label relationship? How’d it go?