Scaling Your Agency Through Outsourcing With Brian Gerstner

Hey everybody, and welcome to this week's Agency Accelerator podcast. Now this week we're talking all about how marketing agencies can leverage outsourcing to enhance their capabilities and fuel growth. And I'm really excited today to be joined by Brian Gerstner, founder of White Label iq, a company that provides white label digital services to help agencies scale. Brian's got years of experience working in the agency world and working with agencies of all sizes to offshore design, development and paid media. Now, with outsourcing on the rise, I was keen to get Brian's expertise on how agencies can incorporate outsourced labor into their business model and operations. So we'll discuss the pros and cons of doing this versus hiring in house and how you go about finding reliable partners and making it all work smoothly. And then if we get chance, kind of be remiss to not ask Brian about how AI is going to impact all, all of this. So the goal today is to provide you with some actionable advice about how outsourcing can be a growth accelerator for your agency if done right. I'm Rob Da Costa and this is the Agency Accelerator podcast. As someone who has stood in your shoes, having started, grown and sold my own agency, I know just how it feels in the ups and downs of agency life. So this podcast aims to ease your journey just a little bit by sharing mine and my guests experiences and advice as you navigate your way to growing a profitable, sustainable and enjoyable business. So let's dive in. And first of all, Brian, thanks so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having me. I love it. Thank you.

Good. So to kick things off, can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to start an outsourcing company focused on sporting agencies?

I would say it happened the way a lot of businesses come about. We found a problem and we started working on ways to fix it and that problem solution to it just kind of kept growing. So I say that in the sense that I come from just client facing, brand strategy, marketing and in that we were having a lot more complex requests for just digital needs as we were growing. I don't want to date myself too much and how that long that progression was, but you know, the asks were more complicated, the needs were faster and we just found that we couldn't do it in house because we started bottlenecking. And so we did classic hiring, people, freelancers, contractors, different agencies and going offshore. And as we did that, we realized that a lot of our peers in the marketing world had the exact same issue and it allowed us to Scale. And we started just working with our peers allowed us to scale. And that just started to bloom. And the revenue from it became a true business line. And we looked at it one day and was like, we have another business. And from there we started just making a lot of decisions on how to grow it, how to make it better, and how really to tailor it to our audience a little bit better. So we solved our own problem and took it to market.

Well, that's always a smart approach to starting a business, as opposed to thinking you've got a great idea and then finding that no one wants it. So that's great. So let me ask you a short question, that's a big question, which is when would an agency typically choose the outsourcing, the white label route? Rather than actually deciding to bring those.

Skills in house as you're beginning, you should outsource. You should learn from your partners, and you should also build enough business and revenue behind that vertical before you start bringing on fixed costs. So there's always an advantage to learning from your partners first. You may test those waters and decide it's not for you.

Right? Yeah, that's a good shout. So what tips have you got for agencies to determine, like, what tasks can I outsource versus what tasks should I have done in house? Whether that be the complete task or like the account management part of a task? I don't know. What would your view on that be?

Well, two ways is first, when you have like repetitive type work that often is very easy to outsource because you can define it really well, you can hand it off to your partner and expectations are very clear. The other areas, when it's just outside of your core of what you know how to do well, outsource it quickly. Learn once again to that prior question, learn from your partner and then decide if you want to bring it in house and how you want to bring it in house. But because communication is so key in working with people outside of your own business, you do have to be able to put definition to what you're wanting. That is the good first step. Once you get into more complexity. That comes with trust. That comes with knowing that your partner has your needs in mind and you can go to them with a problem. That's very much how our clients coming into an agency ask. They come at us with the problem. And just as with your partner, start small, give defined requests and then kind of build that trust and go bigger and bigger and take longer strides in faith.

Yeah, that's a really good shout about doing it like that. I had quite a few failures when I was trying to hire a virtual assistant to work or a team of virtual assistants to work with me. And it wasn't until I documented my like, standard operating procedures that I could successfully outsource this to a team. My team is based in the Philippines and they do a lot of stuff for me now. I guess I'm echoing your point really, that it wasn't a. Until I wrote it down, actually showed them how to do stuff that they were successful with it. So I think it's a good point to say do that first and then when you trust them, you can go to them with questions. So one question around that, although maybe you've already answered it, is what systems and processes do you think agencies need to establish in order to have that successful relationship and also ensure that the quality of the work that the outsourced partner is delivering is kind of what you would expect and what your clients would expect.

The beginning of it is, starts with a very clear scope of work, focusing on the discovery and making sure that you're documenting what the expectations are at the beginning of the relationship that you're over communicating it. And then from there you can build out more processes based upon what's important to you and your clients. I would start with things that are really just top of mind now. So if, if your agency is very creative focused, okay. And you are, then you're going to want to start to build processes that are going to support and help build upon that authority because you are good there and you can contribute to those processes and you can set expectations with your partner through that. There will be a lot of other processes that your partner will also need to bring to the table and communicate to you clearly. Because if they're not telling you how they're doing things or what they're doing, you can't set those expectations with your client also. So the answer is, I'd really start in your own wheelhouse. Start with what's important to you to make sure that you're maintaining that authority and you're able to set expectations clearly. It's not easy to set expectations in an area that you really don't know or feel comfortable in.

Yeah, again, that's a good shout because I mean, often people are outsourcing because they don't have those skills in house or they don't want to have those skills in house, or they don't have them yet. So they may not already always know exactly what they need. And I guess that's where the sort of stage two of trusting your partner comes in.

And in that too, you know, finding a partner, referrals, you know, if you want to move quickly, you need confidence, you need credibility. And the best way to do that is talking to your peers in the industry. Our peer networks have been one of the most helpful things that we've ever participated in.

Yeah, so that's. That leads me on to the next question, which you've already started answering, really, which is how should agencies approach finding and vetting the right reliable outsourcing partner or freelancer or offshore or whatever it is?

As I said, you know, referrals go a long way and there is always a bit of a leap of faith that happens. But you do want to start by just, do you feel comfortable? Are, are they communicating? Is it important to that partner? And are they trying to bring clarity? Are they asking questions? Do they want the work in. In that regard, you can then start taking steps that you feel comfortable with. I always talk to clients and say, we're going to over communicate here. Please don't feel that I'm annoying, but I'm going to email and call you a lot at the very beginning because there's a lot of assumptions that happen and we need to make sure we're clearing that. And maybe a, you know, a zoom call is not necessary. But I'd really like to go to that level because I want to feel comfortable and I want you to feel comfortable. And I want to start moving, taking bigger strides, faster. By doing that, I feel that there's an investment that happens. And if the person on the other side, the partner is investing in you, then that's a good sign. And the other thing is, do you feel comfortable? Is the communication clear? Are they trying to create additional clarity? Are they explaining things to you in a way that you can understand and you can talk to your own clients? Because that's key in this particular industry. Because when you bring on an outsource, you're adding another layer. So if your partner's not communicating things to you, you can't communicate to your end client. And if you're not communicating to your end client, they don't think you're doing anything. Or, you know, I mean, silence is death in this industry. So we need to keep talking.

I mean, the, the answer really is, what you're saying is treat your partners exactly the same way you would treat a client. Because if you want a new client, you'd want to over communicate at the beginning. You'd want to reassure them. You don't want to get all the systems set up, you're going to do a lot more work at the beginning to build that relationship. And also we all know that the best clients are ones that are kind of similar, have similar culture to us. And I guess you're saying the same thing about a partner as well, that you want to find a partner works in a similar, similar way to you. So some good advice there. What risks or downsides should agencies be aware of with outsourcing?

With risks, I mean, one of the benefits is outsourcing often allows you to mitigate risk in general. As we talked earlier about bringing on different amounts of work, the other side of the risk has to do if expectations aren't clear. When you talked about processes and I mentioned, you know, that scope of work, the biggest risk is when you just try to throw work over the fence and expect it to come back, you know, the way you want it. It is making sure expectations are clear and that you're going to receive what you need. Because we often put ourselves in these situations, and particularly in marketing where you start to work on a project, it might not be a small project, it could be weeks or months into it. And if you get to the end and it's not what you wanted, that's a huge problem. So communication fixes a lot of that. But the risk is really just getting to the end and not having what you expected. Once you've done a few projects, you get more comfortable, expectations are clear, there's more trust, and once again you can move faster. But I would highly encourage to mitigate that risk, do more iteration. Someone needs to communicate. There should not be a blackout, period. There should, if anything, be a. Just wanted to give you a status update that there is no update or on track. Everything is going well because there's a lot of. You're making yourself very vulnerable. And that's why I think a lot of people feel uncomfortable doing outsourcing because you can't control what's going on. So iterative communication and making sure that constantly you're over communicating and that expectations are clear is a way to mitigate it. And if you don't do that, the risk is that you end up with something you dead you don't want. You lose a client.

Yeah, absolutely. This is one of those slow down to speed up moments. You know, get it, find the right partner, onboard them correctly, brief them really well, communicate really well and then you're more likely to get to the end result quicker.

Yeah, I mean there is a lot of benefit to doing the work up front, to doing that planning. And in agencies, often we're just trying to rush and we're trying to get things and throw things over the fence sometimes. But if you can pause and you can take that time at the beginning and like I said, invest into what's happening with that partner, you're going to save so much time and heartache at the very end and your client is going to see that through the process because you'll have the updates. There will be clarity. Planning at the beginning, particularly if we're talking about, say, web development is critical too, because there's just so many places for it to go wrong. There's so much many opportunities for scope creep or expectations not being aligned. I mean, that's with anything that you're not familiar with. And that's the whole basis of outsourcing, right. That you're not familiar with and not taking it on.

And I guess a good partner is always going to ask the right questions at the beginning as well. So not just relying on you to ask them the right questions, but them to ask you the right questions.

So, well, that's a lot of time because you don't know what you don't know and you need that partner to mitigate risk by asking those questions. As we talked in, whether it's asking the right questions to understand the business objectives for a design project, what are you really trying to accomplish and what's the goal? Or when you get into a development project that's complex and just allowing people to tell you what could go wrong in the future, or how their decisions are affecting the price, you're relying on that person to cover you.

So can you give us some examples of the type of projects or the type of work that you can outsource or that you see people approaching you to find people for.

A lot of it is design. So in working in an agency with Core Flex type, where you're keeping a smaller amount of people in house, you can set the design, you can set the standards, you can get the look and feel of a project and then you can hand it off to a production person. So that's an instance, as we talked before, you're able to define it so it's easier to hand off and it's easier to communicate expectations when you're coming into development. That's one area where outsourcing is very strong because more and more you need subject matter experts to really know what they're doing and to be able to, as we said, ask the right questions when we get into things like paid media. This. The landscape is getting way more complicated. There's more channels to go into and there's a more need to be accountable for the dollars that you're spending. So finding someone who really knows what they're doing and can craft a good strategy is critical so that you're just not wasting people's money. Think another is just administrative kind of ad hoc tasks. A lot of agencies aren't geared really well to do the smalls. You could have a fire drill or a small come in and it eats like your entire day. Whereas you could have been client facing, you could have been selling something, you could have been working on a bigger project that's going to have a greater impact. So those little tiny things like be it a content change or a landing page or a small production design work, if you can outsource those things, then you can reduce the fixed costs in your company and you can really deliver value in what you do well and let somebody else take care of those one, two, three hour things. The beauty of that too is you can bring them in house when you need to. If you're slow, you can start bringing that work back in house. But you then have built a relationship. You have an outlet, you have somebody that you can go to when work increases and you don't have to say no or you don't have to compromise on the quality and delivery of your project.

And I guess if you've outsourced it, first of all, you kind of know what you're looking for when you decide to bring it in house and you understand it better, which you may have not done before you outsourced it.

Yeah. And one thing I talk about too is start now, find partners even if you don't have the work. Start investing now because when you need it, it's too late.

Absolutely. That's such a true thing. We all need to build our pool of freelancers partners so that they're there when we need them. Because as you say, when you need them and you haven't got them, it's sort of too late. And there's a good chance then you're going to take the wrong partner on because you just need someone to do the work.

Right? Yeah. And I'm seeing now in the market that agencies, particularly in 10 to 30 range in staffing are actually shrinking. I am seeing more and more agencies kind of reduce their footprint and create these strategic partnerships because it's getting noisier out there. As you talked, AI is starting to automate a Lot of things. So now you really have to be known for something. You have to bring strategy, you have to bring a higher level of thought to the table. Mediocrity is just getting beaten out of us.

Yeah, that's very true and we'll touch upon that in a minute because I think AI is expediting that. And of course, the pandemic probably has had a big part to play in first of all, agencies getting smaller, but also realizing that there's multiple ways of working. I don't just need an in house staff with an office. The pandemic sort of taught me that we can remote work, I can use part time people, I can use freelancers and so on. So if I'm, if I'm outsourcing, I found a partner. What advice would you give to ensure that I'm integrating that partner really well into my in house team to ensure collaboration and ensure that the client has a great experience.

When you, when you hire somebody in house, you know, you sit down and you walk them through what you're doing, you show them, hey, here's what we've done in the past, here's what we're doing today. Here's some ideas that I have. So often I see some people come to partners and they just throw it over the wall and you take care of that. But I feel that if you really want it to work, you have to invest in the front end, treat them like an employee, onboard them, tell them you know what you do well, sit down, just have a cup of coffee, talk about how you do workflows, who communicates, who's really good at what, Just let them be familiar with you. Once again, invest that time. Putting time in the front of it is well worth it.

Yeah, so true. I mean, why wouldn't you treat a partner in the same way you treat an employee? And yet most people don't do that. They think, I've got a problem, you can solve it, go and solve it. But they don't really think, well, I need to invest in them. Just like we want our clients to see us as an equal partner, we want to have best client relationships. So the partner, partner relationships, not the unbalanced customer supplier. Well, the same is true with a, with an outsource partner.

Yeah, I mean it's hard. We're in the, in being in an agency, you're in the middle of it and you're so focused on the client and don't really, you have to manage both ends. It's just like in, even in a business sense you're constantly having to add value for the client to demonstrate your worth. Well, I mean nowadays too you, on the other side of that, you have to demonstrate and create value for all the people on, in your company. If you can't create value for them, you're, you're also not going to win because you lose talent. So in that same realm, you know, your clients and your partners, you have to create value for them. You have to invest time and energy into them because they're expected to do the same for you. So yeah, we're in this middle ground, right, where we're, we should know exactly what to expect. But it feels different.

I talk about a lot of agencies being stuck on the client service hamster wheel of doom. They're just very much in that mode and therefore they're not investing enough time in making these partnerships work. And therefore they create their own self fulfilling prophecy of saying, well, I knew that wouldn't work. Listen, before I let you go, I would really like to get your view on how you feel AI is going to impact or is and will impact the future of the sort of marketing landscape.

The, the phrase I said a little bit ago is true. It's going to beat the mediocrity out of all of us. We need to be known for something. We have to demonstrate authority in some area. I feel generalist agencies are going to have the hardest time. They need to be focused into a specific vertical, they need to be focused into a specific industry. It's hard, it's scary, but it's well worth it. If you're just going out there telling everybody you can do everything. I think the day's over, the game's over. People know that's not real anymore. Things have just gotten so much more complicated and the expectation for results is so much higher than it's ever been.

Yeah, I agree. I feel like it's gonna force all of the agencies to up their game and elevate what they do. And of course one of the big advantages is it's going to create more capacity in the agency. They should be more efficient at doing things. But I think we're going to go through this period of time where clients think they can do a lot of it themselves with AI tools like create content or design or whatever. And then they'll try and do that, fail spectacularly and come back to the agencies.

I don't necessarily think all of them are going to fail though. A lot of them are going to be able to bring it in and manage more of it. But that's, you know, why we have to up our game. It's no longer good enough just to be able to create banner ads. We have to demonstrate, like how those banner ads speak to a very specific audience in a very specific way. So the production aspect is going to be the price pressure, our ability to deliver, the time to deliver is going to be insane.

Yeah.

Came out. You know, all of a sudden everybody's like, hey, we're going to. Worked three, four hours a day. You know, here, here I'm agent dating myself a little bit. But it didn't. We just had to work twice as hard.

Wow. I, I suspect we're just in a cycle. Like if you go back to the industrial revolution, you can imagine how that impacted people or I don't know, when the computers first came around. I remember when calculators came out. I'm older than you, so. And how that was going to change everything. And then, you know, the electronic books in Kindles and so on came out. And that was going to kill all the publishing industry. And of course it doesn't. It finds its equilibrium.

I was gonna say in, in all those, in, in all those areas that you just mentioned. If you look back, the thing is, massive amounts of jobs were lost. At the end of the day though, more jobs were created every single time. But there's a lot of retraining. There's a lot of, like, your, your cheese is going to get moved. So if you're in the agency business, you're probably okay with change. If you're not, this is the wrong industry. But, you know, you've. As a change agents here with AI, we just have to embrace it in a way that we never have before.

Yeah. And it's, it's really interesting that my view is that we absolutely need to embrace it and we need to see how it can enhance the services we deliver for our clients. As opposed to saying, oh, no, I'm a copywriter and AI will never write as well as me. Because if you as an agency don't embrace it now, you know, your competitors embracing it and they're going to. And your clients are as well, and they're going to end up beating you. So we should be looking at how it can enhance and elevate what we do and support our clients even more.

You'll get left behind if you don't.

Yeah. Okay, so let's wrap this up by me asking you the question that I ask all of my guests, which is if you could go back in time and give your younger self Just starting out in business. A piece of advice. What would it be?

Learn how to say no faster. There's so much power in saying no, and it's not like turning things down. But a lot of saying no has to do with understanding what you really are good at, understanding where, when you're, as you said before, like in that hamster wheel of client services, when it's not a good fit. Because the other side of it is if you say no, you will find a better place, you will find a better client, you will find a stronger niche, you know, but you have to be brave and you have to say no. And you have to put boundaries. That doesn't only help you, but it creates so much more stability in your agency. Your everybody on your staff knows what they're doing, they understand your boundaries. You can scale them if they understand what to do, how to do it, what you do, what you don't do. Everybody within agency can start making decisions that would allow you as an owner to start actually scaling your agency.

Let me ask you a follow on question to that which I started asking my guests. Do you think your younger self would listen to you if you could go back in time and tell them, tell yourself that advice? Would he heed, would, would young Brian heed that advice?

Oh, no, not at all. Not at all.

We also know it, don't we? It's, it's a good, it's a good thing. And maybe saying no comes with confidence. And maybe when we're younger, we don't. We either have misplaced confidence or we don't have confidence. And maybe that's why.

And there are some lessons that can only truly be learned through experience.

Yeah, very true. So if people wanted to learn more about you, reach out to you, where would they go?

Brian? Whitelabeliq.com and our LinkedIn page. We produce a lot of content and we are truly trying to be helpful. So go to our website, check out our content and even just give us a call. I'm always open to just consult. I love talking to my peers. It's been my best resource.

Yeah, good for you. Giving away value is such a fantastic way of building your community and building your credibility with your audience. I'm all for that. So we'll make sure we include all those links in the show notes. And just want to say a big thank you for joining us today. I'm sure the listeners will have got some insightful nuggets from, from the episode.

I appreciate, Rob, thank you.