Hi everyone, welcome to the Paid Search Magic Podcast.
White labeling. A lot of people don’t know what it is. A lot of people who HAVE heard of it think of it as a low quality, shady offshore solution.
Today we’re diving in and busting myths with an interview between Amy and Invisible PPC’s Rob Warner. They’re going to try and get to the bottom of the opportunities and drawbacks of white labeling.
Whether you’re considering offering white labeling as a service or reselling white-labeled services yourself, or just want an inside look into how it all works, you won’t want to miss this episode.
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Transcript:
Amy:: All right. So today we are talking about white labeling paid surf services. And we’ve got a special guest on the show, Rob Warner, who runs Invisible PPC, which is a white label PPC provider to agencies. Rob, thank you so much for being here.
Rob Warner: Hi, Amy. It’s my absolute pleasure. Thrilled to be here.
Amy:: Yeah. So I’m really excited to talk to you, and want to talk more about what you’re doing at Invisible PPC. Because I honestly think that’s a pretty fascinating angle of how you’re offering paid surf services. We also want to talk more about white labeling, and that is going to be a new term for some of our listeners. So to kick things off, why don’t you tell us what is white labeling?
Rob Warner: White labeling essentially is where you as an agency make a sale. You sell a service to a client but then you hire somebody else to fulfill that service for you and to do the internal delivery piece. So you maintain a relationship with a client, somebody else does the work. The way I often think about it is imagine inviting people around to dinner and hiring a private chef. You sit at front of house. You look good. You take the credit with somebody else in the back doing the work.
Amy:: Nice, nice. It lest somebody show up as the hero, and then you’ve got someone else in the background doing the heavy lifting. So in this case you end up doing that heavy lifting for your clients. Is that right?
Rob Warner: It’s exactly that. So you don’t get into white label if you’re looking for fame, certainly.
Amy:: Okay.
Rob Warner: You’ve got to be content with being behind the scenes, doing the work, and somebody else getting the credit for it. And for me, I’m perfectly happy with that equation.
Amy:: Okay. So let’s talk about that for a minute. What is the upside for you? If you’re not getting the credit, what are you getting that is … Why would someone go into white labeling?
Rob Warner: So my why was very simple. My why was sheer cowardice.
Amy:: Okay.
Rob Warner: I was frightened of selling. I didn’t like being a salesperson in an agency. I didn’t enjoy that process, but I really enjoyed being behind the scenes doing the stuff. And so my third PPC client just happened to be an agency who said to me, “Look, Rob. Can we do a deal here? Can you do the work? I’ve got loads of SEO clients. I’ve got loads of website clients. Why don’t we do this. I’ll get one of these guys into my office. I’ll do the selling bit. You do the technical bit and we’ll split the money.” And that was how it started. And from somebody who is a sales coward it was kind of like … Okay. So you do selling. I just do the bit that I’m good at? I’ll take this. And the upside to that is you can gain scale relatively quickly because essentially you can have an army of unpaid sales people out there working to grow their own business but at the same time, growing yours. So one of the first upsides is you can scale quite quickly with this way.
Amy:: Okay, awesome. Yeah. So in terms of how that affects your margins, it sounds like it’s not really cutting in too bad for you. Because you don’t have to do anything on your own for outreach or client acquisition.
Rob Warner: Correct. So if you think about a typical agency organization, yes, our prices are significantly lower. And we do that. We always want our agencies to be able to make at least a 50% to 60% margin on anything that we do for them. Because that’s typically what an agency wants to make, in many cases. So we work for that as our target and that’s how we set our pricing so we know they can achieve that. But the flip side is we don’t have a sales force. We’re not paying sales commissions. We’re not doing all the outreach stuff and marketing activities the other agencies have to do in order to win business. So it cuts both ways.
Amy:: Okay, cool. So you’ve talked some about the advantages to a reseller of why they might want to work with a white label provider. Is there anything else that we haven’t discussed already that someone should be aware of?
Rob Warner: Yeah. So I think if you’re thinking about white labeling it comes down to a couple of things. [inaudible 00:04:01] philosophy is do you want as a business to be using a third party provider? Are you comfortable with the relationship? Because the way you organize your internal processes of the agency making a sale is different if you’re using an external service provider like us to if you’ve got a guy sat at a desk next to you. Clearly, behavior needs to be modified. You need to do things differently because you can’t just lean over the desk and ask a question. Your communications have to be planned more in advance. They have to be planned better and better thought through.
Rob Warner: So that relationship, and it very much is a relationship, needs to be understood very, very clearly from both sides. And it needs to be one where expectations are set and then managed well both with the white label partner, with the agency, and ultimately with the client. Because you need to make sure that … We’re here to make clients happy. And if you set a bad expectation at the client end, then that’s going to flow all the way through the workflow and the relationship.
Amy:: Yeah, okay. So you brought up a couple good points. So let’s talk about the ultimate end client. So your client’s client, basically. A lot of times end clients will need help with strategy. They’ll need help with goal setting. They’ll need help with just getting those basic expectations. How do you contribute to that to make sure you’re on a path to success?
Rob Warner: Well, the way we handle it, and I can’t speak for any other service providers, but the way we handle it is we like to be involved with the agency who is our partner pre-sale. And we generally help them out with two things there. So number one thing we can do is if there’s an existing search emphasizer we can audit the account and set expectations for outcomes that they’re going to achieve. If it’s not an existing account then what we will do is we’ll do effectively like … We call it a market analysis. Essentially it’s a forecast of what we believe the outcomes would be likely to be if they were to become a search emphasizer. So by doing that, we’re involved in the agency pre-sale so that when they actually bring them on as a customer, good expectations have been set. Because setting good expectations, as you know for the sales process, half of retention happens during the sales process, not after. And so we want to make sure our agency partners are well-equipped with all the information they need to make a good, quality sale, setting good expectations for the client, and we give them the tools and the resources to do that.
Amy:: So I’m going to make an assumption here that if you are able to partner with the agency to be able to provide that kind of value for their clients, that you are working with people who have a pretty good grasp on paid search. You’re not hiring people brand new and training them. You’re working with people who have a certain level of expertise. Is that right?
Rob Warner: Our internal staff, do you mean?
Amy:: Yes, yes.
Rob Warner: Yeah. So internally we hire both experienced and junior staff. So the way we hire is we have essentially two levels on our sort of agency side of our business. So we have what we call account directors, who are … They’re the direct face and voice of our business to our agency partners. And so they will be interacting. They’ll be communicating. They’ll be working on strategy with them. They’ll be an interface. Effectively, they will be the person who will be sat next to them at the desk as an internal role. We generally hire very good, experienced ad words people in particular who have been there, been around the block, and done it lots of times, usually in a traditional agency environment. And so they’ll come in seasoned. We will then hire junior account managers who will typically bring from say, a marketing degree background but not necessarily ad words or paid search, and we will train them up. And we kind of train them in our version of how the world of paid search works. So they start and become sort of indoctrinated. The only way they know is our way, which is kind of really helpful for us.
Amy:: Yeah. When an agency is working with you, you mentioned that they would have different expectations then if they were working with a coworker right across the desk. Besides that remote factor, which obviously is going to be there, what are some things that are going to be different about their relationship with you that they might need to know is going to be different than if they had someone who was a remote worker but actually literally a part of their team?
Rob Warner: It’s really interesting difference, actually. So I think the downside to an organization like ours … And if we say we’re a white label provider rather than a freelance or an outsourcer, the downside difference is that we will typically … We have a schedule. We like to plan things. So if there are fires in an account and [inaudible 00:08:48] we’ll deal with it quickly. But otherwise, we’re generally saying look, let’s be respectful of each other’s time and let’s work to a routine communication schedule. So that is one thing that we try and do differently. Where there is an immediate urgent issue, we try and jump on it as quickly as we can. But that kind of removes some of those water cooler kind of conversations that you might otherwise have with an outsourcer. Some business owners love that, because as far as they’re concerned it’s you do your bit, I’ll do my bit, and I’ll get on with growing my business while I know you’re taking care of that.
Rob Warner: Others who, particularly if they’ve got a technical background themselves, like to meddle in the account and like to get involved in [inaudible 00:09:27] on a daily basis, they will struggle with an organization like ours. Because they want that kind of interactive thing on a daily basis, and that gets really hard for us. It becomes uneconomical and becomes a difficult relationship. The flip side of that where if you compare us with a freelancer or other white label providers with a freelancer is what we should bring to that party is scalability and resilience. So let me explain what I mean by that.
Rob Warner: So for us, if somebody brings us 10 clients today, that’s fine. We can handle 10 today. That’s not a problem. We’ll put it through our normal process, and it’s fine. It’s scalable. If someone brings a 10 tomorrow and 10 the next day, it’s still fine. If you’re working with a single freelancer, by the time you get to client number 15, they’re probably sinking. And so the only way to scale that is to work that person until they collapse or to go and find another freelancer. And you then get into the situation of have they got the same workflow? Are they as responsive to the behavior in the same way? Do they manage things in the same way? So you have this kind of sideways scaling, but it’s kind of an unpredictable, bumpy kind of scaling.
Rob Warner: Because every individual freelancer effectively is an entirely different business process. And as we all know, and we’ve all been there with freelancers, you will get a really good one. You’ll get a terrible one. You’ll get one who is great but then disappears. So you have this kind of dynamic where we say that’s not the way we appear to our partners. We’re there. We’re consistent. We’re scalable. Whether account director A or account director B manages your account for us, internally your experience of communication and account performance with us will be exactly the same, because we’ve got the processes in place to do it.
Rob Warner: And along with that, what we should be able to bring to that is A, all the tools of the trade. So we typically will provide all the platforms for our partners like reporting platforms, call tracking platforms, landing pages. We can bring that, whereas typically a freelancer isn’t going to bring all those things. You’re going to have to pay for them yourself internally. And I guess the final thing that goes into that equation is a lens on the market and expertise. And if somebody says hey, Invisible PPC, I’ve got a dental client. Do you think you can get his campaign worked for me? We go, well, the other 149 are doing quite fine. So 150 is probably going to be okay, too.
Amy:: Right.
Rob Warner: If you’re on client number three, you can’t make that same level of informed decision making and judgment on it. And that’s one of the differences. That sort of context is a very, very valuable thing, in my opinion.
Amy:: Yeah, yeah. That’s a really good point. And this does allow you to be able to have that kind of breadth of experience.
Rob Warner: Yeah. And we can see in a heartbeat if something’s not right. Because if you show us a dental implants campaign or a roofer campaign, we’ve seen so many of them that in a manner of seconds we can know whether it’s on the right track or not.
Amy:: Right. So I want to dig a little bit deeper into how this works for your reselling, your agency partners, for their clients.
Rob Warner: Sure.
Amy:: Because obviously if people are working directly with their clients, they know what that relationship looks like. But what does it look like when you remove the person who’s doing the work from the person who’s presenting the work? Do you prep your clients to say hey, here’s how you’re going to present this information or this chart, or here’s why this is the way it is, or if they have these questions? I mean, are they kind of going in blind and if their client has a question they’re like oh, I’ll get back to you in 48 hours? What does that end up looking like?
Rob Warner: Actually, it’s interesting. It’s a combination of both of those things. As far as is practically possible, we want our agencies never to be caught off guard. Because nobody likes being that guy, being asked a question that you don’t know the answer to. So we work with our agencies to make sure that through our reporting and through our communication with them, they’ve got everything they need in advance of speaking to their client. And we also schedule regular calls in with them. So what we’ll typically do is prepare reporting for our client. We’ll then schedule a call with our agency partner. We’ll brief them on the key points in that report, the issues, the opportunities, the things that are in there that they want to highlight and pull out, and the sort of sales messages that are in there, as well, and let them then relay that onto the client.
Rob Warner: Because that has an advantage partly in that the person on the call with the client … Because they’re not the person doing it. One thing we’ve found, and we’ve had this happen because sometimes we do do client calls with our agency partners. Perhaps we’ll talk about that later on. But what we find sometimes, if the person who is doing the work is the person on the client call, you can get into a level of detail that quite frankly isn’t helpful for the client. Because you start arguing about individual keywords or individual split tests. That’s not where the value for that client is. The value lives at the strategy and the issues and the opportunity level, not whether I should run this particular keyword for an account. And the danger is by the person doing the work being that guy on the call, quite often they’re quite proud of the work they do. Rightly so. And they want to talk about a keyword, which isn’t in the client’s best interest.
Rob Warner: So we always encourage our agencies to be very strategic in their client calls, to talk about the things that matter, to focus on the value being created, to highlight the opportunities that are there. And if they ever get this question, which inevitably happens where a client says what about this particular format? I see you’ve not done that. Why not? Why is this the thing? Or usual, I searched for myself on Sunday afternoon. I couldn’t see my ad. Those kind of calls where they don’t know the answer, they can legitimately say, look, as you know I’m not the person doing the day to day on this. One of my account managers is doing that for me. I’ll go and check in with them and I’ll come back to you. And that works in the vast majority of cases. If there a technician, they’re capable and more often than not they will handle those questions directly themselves anyway just with a cursory glance at the account.
Amy:: Yeah. So that brings up something that’s really interesting. It does sound like … And I think you made an excellent point, that it’s important to the extent we can to steer clients more towards this strategy and avoid getting into the really granular details when we’re on the call. Because that’s not what’s driving business growth is the performance of a particular keyword or the position, or anything like that. It does sound like that the success of that relationship is going to be a bit dependent on that agency that you’re working with and their ability to be able to drive those conversations appropriately. You’re guiding them. But if you have someone who’s able to really see what their client needs at a high level and speak to that, that’s going to be a lot more effective than someone who just is like, well, I don’t know. We have someone else doing it, and they just kind of show up for the call.
Rob Warner: Exactly. And you’ve touched on a really, really important point there. And it actually speaks to both the client experience, the agency’s and ours as a white label partner. You asked what the upsides and downsides of being white label earlier. One of the downsides that I didn’t touch on is that we don’t control the end client experience. Our partners do. Some of them are really good. Some of them [inaudible 00:16:46] suck. And that means that when it comes to things like retention, we can see very clear patterns in our partner relationships as who does a great job working with their clients and who doesn’t. And it reflects in client retention.
Rob Warner: We know that 80% plus of campaigns where the client cancels on an agency partner of ours, are hitting the goal that we’ve agreed with them. So if they’re hitting the goal that’s been agreed, the issue is elsewhere. And that issue can be one of the client doesn’t invest heavily enough in the relationship. We all know that the first 100 days of a client relationship are absolutely critical. If they’re not engaging in that because … And this is sometimes a things that happens when you’re white label … You perceive that it’s being done and you don’t have to worry about that client anymore. Well, no. That client is still a client. You still need to manage the relationship.
Rob Warner: And sometimes agencies don’t do that. Sometimes we have agency partners who quite foolishly are frightened of those conversations that you highlighted a minute ago. They’re frightened of getting caught out with a question they don’t know the answer to. So they prefer to avoid the call in the first place. So we quite often will have a conversation where we’ll say hey, agency, how is that plumbing company getting on? We see them look at the stats. They look great. What do they think of them? And the response we’ll sometimes get is oh, we haven’t spoken to them in a while.
Amy:: Oh, no.
Rob Warner: I think they’re fine. They’re probably okay. They’re like, can you check in?
Amy:: They haven’t fired us, yet.
Rob Warner: Yeah. And it’s kind of, don’t wake the bear.
Amy:: Right.
Rob Warner: Don’t engage in some of those conversations. That’s a real problem that I see that sometimes it can lead to an abdication of responsibility. And really there are three party that need to make this work. There’s us as the agency and there’s the client. And if any one of those drops the ball or disengages from the relationship, then ultimately the relationship ends. And nobody wants that.
Amy:: Right. So in terms of how you’re showing up to be able to help your agency clients and how you present to the end clients there, when you are on those calls or when you are involved or you’ve got the … The agency is like oh, I’m going to go back and talk to my account manager. Do you show up as if you are part of that team? Do you have email aliases from them or is it just pretty much-
Rob Warner: Yeah. We were quite often … What we typically do is it will usually be a sort of voice call. So it will typically be a conference call where we will go on the call with the agency partner, usually the owner or their account manager, whoever holds the relationship, and the client. And we will be introduced as hi, this is Rob, my PPC manager. And that’s how we’re introduced to people. So there are many people we’ve had conversations with and I would say people don’t know we’re here. As far as they’re concerned, we’re part of the agency’s team. In all the time we’ve done it, I don’t think that’s ever been challenged or questioned.
Amy:: Okay, yeah. I have had that experience a lot where I am essentially white labeling, but then I will … I’ve even had to fly in, like, go on cross country trips and show up as like yeah, I’m the paid search manager here. It’s like, well, for a day I am.
Rob Warner: We have to do it on occasion. Yeah. On occasion we have done that. And if it’s for the right client, for the right reasons … We’ve even got a meeting set up in a few weeks time where we’re flying one of my staff and the Googler into a client-
Amy:: Oh, wow.
Rob Warner: … to help cement the relationship.
Amy:: Wow. That’s really cool.
Rob Warner: Yeah. It should be good fun.
Amy:: Yeah. So if an agency is looking to possibly start reselling paid search … Maybe they don’t do it yet, but for all the different reasons that they might consider it, they’re in the process of considering. What should they look for in a white label provider or what are some maybe red flags that say absolutely don’t go with these people?
Rob Warner: That’s really, really interesting. So first thing that I always look for is are they white labeling and selling direct to clients? If they’re doing both, that feels to me like an agency riding too many horses. You can’t be service provider and competitor to the same market, in my opinion. So I always recommend look for somebody whose business model is to white label, because it is a fundamentally different business to operate. Our setup is not the same setup as an agency. And I’m sure everybody else in the space wouldn’t be that way. So number one is, is that what they really do or are they doing it as an aside because it’s extra fees and a bit more revenue and they’ve got a guy who’s not too busy at the moment?
Rob Warner: Look for how they ensure quality across their team, is the second thing. And with that, resilience and scalability. I mentioned a moment ago about in terms of if someone brought a 10 today, 10 tomorrow and 10 the next day, we cope. Other agencies wouldn’t necessarily cope with that. And what they are is actually a regular agency doing a bit of white label on the side. Look at whether their staff are truly staff or if they’re simultaneously contracting and subcontracting it out of the back door. And that happens more often than you might think, where as far as you’re concerned you’re engaging a local white label partner, and what they’re actually doing is offshoring overseas.
Rob Warner: And with that, make sure your white label partner is … If it matters to you, that it’s generally someone in your country on your timezone, speaks the same language natively as you do, and writes ad copy and sends locations. Make sure that that’s what that person is, and again, it isn’t going offshore to somewhere that will be a different timezone, different communication protocols, and different lags. And also, look for what in terms of tools they’re going to bring to the party, as well. Are they going to really bring you the tools that you need or are you going to have to still pay for your own as well, and give them access to it?
Amy:: Yeah. Okay. So I’m going to ask you … And you might not have an answer for this, and that’s fine. But you say to make sure. Everyone knows that those are things that are going to matter. And so they’re all going to pretend that they offer. Right? Of course we have people who are … We’re not just offshoring this. We have people who are local. And whether or not they do, there’s definitely this front of yeah, sure, that’s what we do. How would you, beyond just asking the question to which you’ll get as an answer that’s what you want to hear, how would you make sure of that? Or is it just well, do your best? Are there ways to make sure?
Rob Warner: I wish I knew. I mean, you can just obviously do obvious things like go and check any company records you can find, go and check any domain records you can find and do your online due diligence. Do some research. What are the reviews like? See what other people’s experiences have been. There’s usually something going on there if there’s so many negative reports. Somebody else has previously found it at some point. Ask them outright upfront. And if necessary, put it in the service agreement with them. Somebody may be willing to tell a white lie to your face in order to secure a deal. But they’d be a lot less comfortable putting it in writing.
Amy:: Okay. All right, that’s good to know. What kind of tools should a person at an agency be looking for in a white seller arrangement?
Rob Warner: I think at least you’re looking for somebody who can bring a reporting platform to you so you don’t have to go out and buy your own. You’re looking for someone who can integrate call tracking. You’re looking for somebody who can take things like landing page designs, whether it’s Unbounce or Leadpages, or whatever it might be. And it depends what your agency has already. If you’re already doing things that involve those services, you might already have your own. It might not matter to you. But if you haven’t and you’re say, an SEO or a design agency adding PPC services to your business, then if you can avoid those additional expenses, avoid those expenses.
Amy:: Okay. So we might be getting to it a little bit later, but the people that you have who are designing landing pages, who are working all those, are those your paid search team? Do you actually contract separately with landing page designers? Or how do you go about fulfilling that?
Rob Warner: It will probably come as no surprise that we have graphic designers on staff. So we have a graphic designer. Well, actually we have two, one’s part-time currently, who work for us. And one of the things we like to do … So we provide an Unbounce account. We use our own Unbounce account. We’ve got a large one with Unbounce, as you might expect. So we do all our landing pages on that. But we never … Unless we’re forced into it, we never want to go back and start from zero. If somebody brings us say, a new client, a new plumber for example, we will already have plumbing landing pages that convert really well. So rather than having to go back and start from zero, we’ll say hey, choose from these ones here that work the best and we’ll make a custom version of that for your client.
Amy:: Got you.
Rob Warner: Because we know we’re seeing say, 20% conversion rates on those pages. Why would you take a guess on a brand new page? Occasionally people get quite precious about design and insist that we actually go back and start again. And that’s their call. But most people just will focus on the outcome rather than the process to get there.
Amy:: Yeah. That makes sense. So if a paid search manager or agency wanted to start offering white label services, just kind of shift the conversation from what’s in it for the resellers, but to someone who’s currently doing paid search and they want to start doing a white label, would your advice be to only provide white label services if that is your thing? Because you just mentioned hey, avoid anyone who’s doing both. Would you suggest it’s all or nothing, like, both feet in or just avoid it entirely? Or do you think that there’s room for someone to offer it as a separate service in addition to what else they’re doing?
Rob Warner: It depends what they’re already doing. And I think every agency is different and every agency’s ethical viewpoint is different on this one. For me, we shut down direct client services, because it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. But that isn’t to say it’s somebody else’s decision. So if they want to offer white label services, I think understand that a white label client is just as valuable as a regular client, in some ways more so. Because that one white label relationship with one agency partner might bring you 10 clients.
Amy:: Right.
Rob Warner: Most regular clients won’t refer you 10. So understand that difference and be prepared for that. And what that often means is because you’re taking compared to a regular agency service, a margin hit … Because you certainly won’t be charging the same prices that you’re charging for your normal clients, I’ve seen agencies who’ve started that and gone, I don’t really want to work on this low value, lower margin white label work when I can focus on my direct clients who pay me a lot more. So go into it with your eyes open, and knowing that that is a trade off you are going to see. Be prepared for it and be comfortable with it and embrace it for what it is. Because it isn’t a better or worse business model. It’s just a different business model. But do that knowingly.
Rob Warner: Also, be prepared that you need to create new process flows. Because you’ve now got an agency in between you and the client. And the things that will be simple conversations to have with the client … We touched on this right at the start. It’s easy to ask a client for a C name record so you can set up a landing page for them, for example. It’s a lot more difficult when you’ve got a different agency in the middle who may not of even heard of a C name, doesn’t know what it is, or how to communicate it to the client. So be prepared to set up different communication workflows and manage that relationship in a different way. So don’t assume that your existing process you use for a client will just transfer over to a white label business, because it doesn’t. You need to set up separate workflows for it. And don’t try and run one off the other. Otherwise, it will fail horribly.
Amy:: That is such excellent advice. Everything you just touched on, like five things in a row. Like, wow. That’s great, that’s great, there’s so much value in there. Thank you for that.
Rob Warner: No problem. Can I say one more to you?
Amy:: Yes.
Rob Warner: In fact, maybe two more-
Amy:: Sure. Keep going.
Rob Warner: … I think that before I should have mentioned. Rules and responsibilities. Make sure that when you’re white labeling it’s very clear what’s on you and what’s on them. Because again, we see it sometimes where there is this sort of sense of abdication in a relationship. Don’t allow that to happen. Make sure that you know what you’re delivering and what your client knows what they’re delivering. Because if you don’t do that, what tends to happen is … I often think about it as like it’s lifting something out of a box. If you don’t tell somebody what’s in the box, they imagine their version of what they think is in the box. And you imaging your version of what you think is in the box. And they often look very different. So the clearer you can make that up front in terms of who is responsible for what and the time scales that are involved in that, and the communication needs between the two parties … Get those as clear as possible up front and it will be a better relationship. Don’t just allow them to evolve, because no one knows what the heck is going on. And remember your agency partner may have no more knowledge of what we’re selling than the client you would have sold to.
Amy:: Right, right, right.
Rob Warner: And so in the same ways you have to educate a client, you often have to educate an agency just as much, if not more. Because they need to not only understand it, they need to understand it and relay it to the client.
Amy:: Right.
Rob Warner: So you got to be prepared to educate.
Amy:: Yeah. That’s a good point. You mentioned the one just before about making sure it’s really clear about expectations and roles. Do you have an example of where something tends to go wrong? We all kind of have some degree of a fuzzy idea. But is there something you see go wrong a lot where someone just walks away from it? What do you see happen when that’s not working right?
Rob Warner: The thing that we see most often, the biggest point of breakdown every single time, is sales process and onboarding process. It’s what have you sold and how have you sold it. So you know what the client’s getting. It’s communicated well during onboarding. We have an onboarding form and we’ll often get things like we’ll say okay, what’s the primary service that you’re going to want this client to [inaudible 00:30:58]? I say the dentist as my go-to example. It could be dental implants, it could be emergency, it could be pediatrics. And it’ll get TBA. Okay. When are you going to … TBA is this information. And sometimes I’ll then speak to the agency after that and they’ll say, “What do you think we should sell? What’s the best place to start?” And I’m like, “What have you actually sold? What does the client think they just bought from you that you’re now trying to guess with us?” And so it’s that understanding, that onboard process, and making sure that’s really, really solid throughout. Because often you’ll find an agency will go, “We just got a campaign live.” And we’ll go, “Great. But we’ve got some information missing.” We promised it’d be live on Thursday. They’ll go, “It’s Tuesday now and we still don’t got half the stuff. Help.”
Amy:: Right.
Rob Warner: So it’s those kind of little points of detail where as if we’re doing it in house you just got the guy next to you. You go right, do it now. Build it and I’ll call the client, and we’ll try and make it up as we go. And you can’t do that so easy. So be aware of those responsibilities and time scales, in particular.
Amy:: Yeah, yeah. That’s a good point. So speaking specifically to Invisible PPC, you are a premier partner for Google. Is that right?
Rob Warner: Yeah. Well, actually we’re a premier partner. We’re actually kind of … We have an unofficial badge beyond that in that we work with the Channel sales team directly at Mountainview. And the Channel sales team is for premier partners who are scalable and growing, and it’s about less than 1% of the worldwide ad words partners. So that’s currently where we are. But they don’t have a badge for it, which is really annoying.
Amy:: Right? Google is notorious for that. They like to tell people like, hey, you guys are special. And then you need that validation and they don’t give it to you.
Rob Warner: It’s really cool because we get to do really, really smart things with Google. They fly people in for us. We put people on stage and we do lots of good things with them. But there’s no badge so we can’t-
Amy:: Right.
Rob Warner: Nevermind.
Amy:: Well, so tell me a little bit about how that works. Because I know for a lot of people who do white labeling, one of the downsides is that they’re logging in with their clients. It’s not something that they own that relationship. When you’re not the primary agency on the account, you don’t get that spend counting towards you. So what does your process look like? How do you get that? Everything you’re managing, how do you get that to count towards you and to grow your own agency while you’re taking care of other people’s?
Rob Warner: It’s an ongoing mystery, is the short-term answer.
Amy:: Oh, okay.
Rob Warner: So we’ve had our relationship at this level of Google now for nearly two years. And only after the first 12 months did they really understand the business model. In fact, we were arranging a deal with them a while ago and they said the only challenge we have with you, Invisible PPC, is the fact that you’re the only 100% white label company we’ve ever done this with. So internally, we don’t have the processes defined to make this fit. So it can be a challenge. But that said, they recognize that. They understand that. And so getting spend account, our spend typically will count for us even though it’s second hand. It only doesn’t count if it’s existing premier partners spend with somebody who has a rep. A proper, nominated, assigned rep, not the help desk and all that kind of stuff. But a proper, nominated, partner rep. So if we look at our current spend portfolio, about 60% of it actually counts towards our own goals and targets. About 40% of it doesn’t.
Amy:: Okay.
Rob Warner: But we use our MCC. So the way we work, just how we do it, we hook our MCC to our agency partner’s MCC. Obviously, they have their client’s MCC. And we use anonymous email addresses accessing our MCCs to achieve that. And so we can’t always trace spend through us.
Amy:: An anonymous email address, what is that?
Rob Warner: Just a Gmail address and those kind of things. So if a client was to ever look at it, it would be just like adwords15@gmail.com, or whatever it might be.
Amy:: Got it. Okay. Yeah. Because I know a lot of times people can be very concerned or cautious about having someone else’s name associated with the account, because they want it to look completely branded by them. So that can be a concern. So that’s how you get around it is just by using-
Rob Warner: Exactly.
Amy:: Okay.
Rob Warner: We’ve never had an issue with that. We’ve very occasionally been challenged on it or asked a question on it, but always an explanation this is just a management email address that we use.
Amy:: Oh.
Rob Warner: It makes the problem go away, makes the question go away.
Amy:: Yeah. Hey, that works. Okay. So I wanted to wrap things up with some questions for someone who might be interested in kind of starting with an agency like yours at an employee level.
Rob Warner: Sure.
Amy:: It sounds like they are just different systems. And so I’m wondering for you, when you’re hiring is there anything that lets you know that a person is really well suited or ill suited for white label that might be different from regular agency or in-house hiring?
Rob Warner: That’s a really cool question. That’s a really cool question. The big difference we look for is we look for people who are interested in solving problems at scale. Because what our relationships are, aren’t necessarily … Our account directors won’t have five in depth relationships that they spend all their month working on. If you’re in a boutique agency and you’ve got a small portfolio of bigger clients, you mainly work on half a dozen accounts during the course of a month. Sometimes, less than that.
Amy:: Right.
Rob Warner: So you get really strong, deep relationships with these individuals and the absolute detail of the account. Our relationships are stronger at agency level. If an agency’s got 20 clients with us, we know that agency pretty well. We know how they work. We know on an individual relationship level. But that’s where the relationship is, not with the individual account. Because what we care about at individual account level is yes, we want that account to hit its targets and that’s what we will do. We’ll manage it to those targets. But in addition, we’re looking to apply the learning from that one account to another 20 that are similar. So the way you see and deliver value is delivering an agency relationship value for its client portfolio, but recognizing that actually your goal is to impact 20 more clients who might not even be your clients. But your impact is broader.
Rob Warner: So people who need those really close, in depth relationships, will tend to struggle. People have to be used to remote working. And remote working itself is a whole set of different challenges that some people love, some people really don’t like. And I think the other thing that we find as well with it is if you are a brilliant creative and you want to spend your whole life doing brilliantly creative things and solving amazing problems, that doesn’t tend to fit very well with white label. Because white label is about iterating. It’s about finding creative solutions, but then applying them at scale. So your scope to innovate can be limited more at time because you’re generally working with more smaller accounts rather than one huge one where you can really play and do some fun stuff.
Amy:: Yeah. That makes sense. Tell me a little bit more about scaling. What would that look like for an employee who comes under your team, they are managing a dentist account? Are they going to have all dentist account? And if not, how are they going to share that information with their other team members? What does that process look like?
Rob Warner: Generally they won’t have all dentists, although I’m saying that, one of our teams in particular specializes in dentists because they-
Amy:: Sure. Why not?
Rob Warner: We have lots of dental clients, so we put them together and said why not put the knowledge in one place so we really, really can drill it as deep as possible? But what they will do is two things. One, we have internal tools that we’ve built on our own that allow us to sort of unearth insights in one account and then look for similar accounts where they might be relevant. So we’re looking for our account management team to find those opportunities and unearth them. And then we’ll look for similarities across the team. Some of those are automated with software. Some of those are on our sort of daily and weekly team calls. We’re looking for what’s the lessons that people are learning this week. What did we learn this week that we didn’t know last week? One of our core values is to learn, share the learning, and systemize the learning, because that’s how we get better at scale. Learning that one person holds in isolation on one account isn’t valuable. We need to learn it to be shared and systemized across the business.
Amy:: Well, I’ll say that that sounds like that’d be useful for any agency, white label or not. Because too often we discover something.
Rob Warner: Absolutely.
Amy:: And we don’t even think to share it with the client, let alone our internal team to someone who’s not working on that exact account that we’re working on.
Rob Warner: Yeah. And it’s such an obvious win. Isn’t it?
Amy:: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob Warner: But I don’t know if you use account management tools or not, but they’re generally not built that well.
Amy:: Right.
Rob Warner: They’re built in very much silos where agencies tend to be structured in that. This team looks after this account or these accounts, and that team looks after those accounts. And the tools all work at an account level basis. There’s no infrastructure in most agencies to share knowledge and experience and best practice and learnings. And so we have to rattle off our own because we can’t buy it.
Amy:: I mean, without going into specifically what tools you’re using and how that’s accomplished, you’re really focused on making sure … That seems like that’s a user end issue, as well. You can have the best software in the world, but if a person isn’t willing to go in and document something, I’m imagining that it falls apart. You have to really be trained on the importance of doing that.
Rob Warner: Yeah, correct. Everything we do, as far as we’re concerned, if you do something that doesn’t get reflected back into our standard operating procedures, it doesn’t exist.
Amy:: Right, right.
Rob Warner: So we would never get upset with somebody about making a mistake, for a reasonable mistake somebody could make. We do get upset if people don’t learn from them, share and systemize it. Because that’s where the value of that learning experience comes from. And so for us, that’s absolutely critical. And I think it’s the same for most agencies, in that we always want to do better, learn, and grow more.
Amy:: Sure. Now, does that mean … And I’m sorry to be really digging into this. I just think it’s really fascinating.
Rob Warner: That’s okay.
Amy:: Does that mean that someone who does make a mistake has to then go in and document it and say this is the thing I did wrong? I missed it and here’s what I learned from it. Is that part of the process? They can’t just sweep it under the rug?
Rob Warner: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because if somebody’s made a mistake that then doesn’t get found out that causes client A a problem, how do we know that same thing hasn’t happened 100 other times?
Amy:: Right.
Rob Warner: An isolated mistake, I don’t like, but I can accept providing we sometimes have to make the mistake to learn the lesson. Don’t we?
Amy:: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob Warner: And so nobody ever gets on the whole upset with somebody about making a mistake. If somebody’s done the same thing five times, we’re upset.
Amy:: Right.
Rob Warner: But if an individual makes a genuine mistake and says okay, this is what happened, however this is the learning outcome from it and this is what I think I can bring, then we’ll invite them to bring their idea to the table. We’ll work with a couple of other colleagues and say okay, is that the best version of the answer we can get or is there a better version of the answer to that problem? And then we’ll build and systemize whatever the best version of the answer is. But I want that person to be part of it because they’ve seen it first hand, what happens when it fails.
Amy:: Yeah. And this is just such an interesting thing. It’s so far beyond the scope of white labeling, but the whole challenge of how do you fix procedures and processes, and when there’s known mistakes. I’m just thinking this is really prevalent in a medical community when no one wants to … It really threatens their core identity because they’re seen as experts. And so to talk about the mistakes they made and why can be really damaging. It can hurt their career. And so in this case, obviously you have a more sheltered environment where you have within the agency system and people talking about it. But I think just being able to share learnings, not just here’s my success story in the case study, but here’s what went wrong or here’s what I learned from it, is so valuable. That if you are building out a system that can facilitate that process, I just think that’s brilliant.
Rob Warner: Yeah. And it’s the best way for us to be. I’m quite a simple individual. I like to sleep well at night, so I like to know that if something’s happened, that the chances of it happening again are as low as possible and we’re taking all reasonable steps. One of the guys that I do a lot of work with and who has been sort of a coach and a mentor and advising me as a business owner said look, first thing you should … Everybody focuses on growing their business and winning new clients. He says the number one thing to focus on is find all the things that can kill you and eliminate them, as many of them as you possibly can. Because you can’t grow a business that’s dead.
Amy:: Oh, man. You’re absolutely, absolutely right on that.
Rob Warner: Yeah. And in this context, the thing that could kill us or anybody else in our position is if we do a terrible job for somebody or we don’t learn from that mistake, or it happens. People place their trust in us when they give us their clients. We have to respect and honor that. They give us their reputation, and we have to protect it. So if once incident happens at one client, then we have to hold our hands up, take responsibility for it, and deal with it. But then we’ve got to make sure that that fix gets rolled out across the business and that there is value in that experience. And that goes for just about any agency I think, out there.
Amy:: Definitely. Well, sorry. I apologize for sidetracking that, but I just think that that was so good.
Rob Warner: It’s fine.
Amy:: So I really appreciate it. But thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about white labeling. You did such a great job of explaining just kind of the inside workings of something that I think a lot of us don’t understand as much. We know what the agency side of it is, but then the white labeling is like, what is that? So you’ve done such a great job of explaining it. I really appreciate it.
Rob Warner: An absolute pleasure. Part of my mission in life is to kind of bust the myth. If somebody says white label, you immediately think offshore, low cost, low quality, bad … That is a version of it, but it isn’t the only version. And I want the world to know that, because we’re actually proud of what we do here and we like to do a good job. And I want the world to know about that.
Amy:: Definitely. Well, Rob, this has been amazing. Where can someone reach you if they want to find out more?
Rob Warner: We’re at invisibleppc.com.
Amy:: Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
Rob Warner: Absolute pleasure. And thank you so much for your time. It’s been a great conversation.
Amy:: Absolutely. Thank you.
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