As we celebrate turning 20 at Webstars, our directors Jez John and Louisa Scott look back at some of the crucial learning experiences that have moulded Webstars into the agency it is today.
Today they discuss white labelling services, the challenges it can present, how an agency can lose its own identity, and how being confident in your area of expertise and staying true to your values can benefit you long-term.
Watch the video below, and if you’d like to learn more about finding your identity as a company, why not contact one of our directors Jez John, Louisa Scott on LinkedIn!
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Somehow, Webstars turns 20 in November 2023 to celebrate 20 years of our existence as a company, when we've seen loads of other agencies fall by the wayside over the years, we decided to record a series of videos. And the theme for the videos that we thought was most appropriate was mistakes we've made and what we've learned from them. And just scanning. And the less jazz of topics for these 20 videos, I noticed that the first one is one that you came up with, and that's about white labelling, which is something we did an awful lot of in our early days. Yeah. And I guess at the time it didn't seem like a mistake in, in, in hindsight illegibly it did give us some advantage. But I think ultimately agencies, white labelling other agencies services is never really the best for any party if I'm being honest. I think when we started doing it, it was in the days of agencies needing to pretend they provided a really full service offering, which in reality would require possibly staff of sort of 30 or 40 or more and they could white. People, our services, it, it was challenging I guess is the best way to put it. It's challenging because it's deceitful for the client. The client nearly always finds out at the end of the day. And it makes processes a whole heap harder because all of a sudden we were going from using our defined processes, communication styles and way of working with clients to working with the agencies processes and client communication styles. And it just never really worked that well for us, albeit it did help us land some really large. Science. It definitely gave us an advantage when it came to pitching for more of our own work. We just couldn't talk about them because we signed NDA so we weren't able to name names. That, that that is true. Although if we Fast forward I think to 2007 eight I think we've got, we've got a slight change there whereby a couple of the white label partnerships turned into technical partnerships or you know technical expert type partnerships. So we did get some benefit long term but in it wouldn't be anything we would do now and indeed we don't white label other people services. Yeah if you work with us you're either working with our permanent team or indeed we're bringing people in as experts. And making it incredibly clear that they are actually contractors from the from the get go. Because they're the right person for the job. I would just add to that. And this is something you touched on, I think, is that we we couldn't really. Define our own values in those early days because we were having to adapt all the time to other organisations, cultures and values and so yeah, I think there were lots of lessons that came out of that. Yeah, I and I think that is incredibly important because I think culture and values are something that's quite often overlooked by organisations and it can end up taking us down a really bad path, I guess. I think there's certain values that we may have inadvertently adopted, which in hindsight were probably not where we were really wanting to head. Absolutely.
