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Said no to a white label deal in Phoenix, then watched what happened from the parking lot
Last Thursday I sat in a Starbucks in Phoenix with a guy who wanted me to white label a big chunk of my retainer work at 40 cents on the dollar. I walked out, mostly because it felt too cheap for what he was asking. Two days later my two biggest clients both told me they wanted to pause things, and I sat on my kitchen floor doing math on what that deal would have covered. So I called him back and asked if the offer still stood, and we worked out a smaller version at a 60/40 split, just one client to start. I found out real fast that holding out for perfect terms when the pipeline is thin is not a strategy. Three weeks in and that one handoff took 11 hours off my plate and he wants two more. For anyone running a small agency, how do you decide what to white label and what to keep in house?
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park.robin21d ago
That line about holding out for perfect terms when the pipeline is thin hit me hard because I did the exact same thing two years back. I turned down a white label deal in Dallas over the cut, felt real proud of myself for about a week, then lost my anchor client and spent a month scrambling to replace that income. When I finally called the guy back he had already filled the slot, so I got nothing except a lesson. What saved me later was picking one part of my work that is repeatable and boring, the stuff I can hand over with a checklist, and keeping the parts where the client actually wants my brain. The boring handoffs go out, the strategy calls and anything weird stays with me. If I had done that math before losing the client I would have saved myself a lot of grief, so good on you for figuring it out in three weeks instead of three months.
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