We started our white label agency shortly after I got laid off from my in-house position. I’d had over a decade of experience at this point, and already had one other successful direct to client agency I’d grown.

Over the years, I saw how many other agencies who were gleefully providing substandard, outdated, and quite frankly shameful service while taking money from family owned businesses and leaving nothing but a trail of broken promises and soured reputations, while others struggled to provide honest results working with dishonest or lazy partners and outsourcers.

I thought that by offering my services-which I had honed over a decade of hard work, late nights, and continual learning and refinement-I could work with well meaning agency owners to elevate our industry and help small businesses grow.

That has not been the case.

What I thought was a vocal minority of agency owners out to take as much money as they can while providing as little in return as possible was the opposite. Most owners know very little about digital marketing, much less running a business, and seem to be content to pump out whatever they think will sell to line their own pockets, customer be damned.

We started with the goal to offer white glove, bespoke services to best meet the needs of the end client. By taking the time to really look over a site - lifting it up on a rack, checking the oil, diagnosing issues and treating problems with specialized parts and repairs - we wanted to provide the best possible performance for customers who have entrusted their sites to our white label clients.

Maybe that was our mistake.

What I realized is that the end client is not our customer, the white label client is our customer. And our customers are impersonal middle-men denying replacements or scaling back repairs based on a lack of technical understanding, and an over reliance on numbers on excel sheets that tell them to cut costs and create miracles out of manure.

Instead of treating underlying issues and building a course of action to build a better future for the end client, most agency owners are happy to just cut repairs, offer free lifetime car washes, brag about putting nitrogen in their tires and call it a day.

Rather than trying to understand what a business owner’s needs and goals are, and how to align a marketing strategy with those goals, too many want an easy to understand list of deliverables to sell-whether or not it is in the end client’s best interest-and some names and faces to pour their rage and shortcomings over when their demands end up failing everyone.

And we’re done with that.

For any of our present and future white label clients, we have a separate ordering system that can be used to order and deliver a list of tasks to sell.

Much like a parent who prefers their teens to drink at home, at least I know that if the tasks are coming from me they’ll be done safely, and with the best intentions in mind.

We will not be taking on any more white label clients for managed campaigns.

Instead, our future will be built on agency partners or business owners who are less interested in a monthly list of services to sell or buy and more interested in outcomes to be achieved.

By targeting a clientele that knows where their experience ends and our knowledge starts, we’ll be able to work together to create the best possible marketing campaigns, help support families and grow American businesses.

Our managed campaigns will become more exclusive, more expensive, and while we will work in conjunction with our partners, we will not compromise on our quality or commitment to the end user.

We will no longer be selling a list of tasks that can be delivered to the business owner to show that we’ve produced work for work’s sake. Instead, we will be looking at future outcomes and goals, and work backwards to build our strategy from there.

Will this make it harder for some agency owners to work with us and sell to their potential customer base?

Yes. And we’re ok with that.

Just as people are careful to choose who they consider a partner or friend, so will we.

We’ve made the mistake of lowering our standards to keep others happy and lost ourselves in the process and 2024 is the year we reclaim what made us, us.

So we’re pivoting our business, and focusing less on the masses of white label clients happy to sell services and concerned only with their own short term gains and focusing more on partnerships (with an agency or with business owners) concerned with the best long term outcomes for all parties involved.

This is why 2024 will be a year of change for our agency, and why I know that our best days are still in front of us.