The joys of onboarding a white label development agency partner
We have all heard the horror stories of companies who have delegated an online design agency to a white label web agency, so we've created this onboarding process to confirm you don’t become another statistic.
Our experience has been working within the industry for several years, so we've got seen the great, the bad, and therefore the quite frankly borderline illegal!
This process will facilitate your choose the proper agency partner after you need a white label web development partner.
We take any client or agency through these steps when acting on a white label web development project.
The process has allowed us to successfully onboard and deliver above and beyond expectations when.
STEP 1: Setting Expectations
The first and most vital step is to debate your agency’s expectations of your white label web development company. In our experience, each digital agency has its tackle what makes an excellent website and therefore the responsibilities of every team member.
The following list covers the foremost common technical expectations that require to be discussed:
-Quality: What’s a suitable quality level? Use examples to indicate what you care about and what you don’t care about the maximum amount. Quality costs money, so it’s essential to agree on the acceptable trade-off for your agency/project expressly.
-Compatibility: Which browsers, devices, and screen sizes does one want your websites to be compatible with? does one have a preference for the way the sites should work on responsive (breakpoints / proportional scaling)?
-Backend setup: How does one favor having sites built? As a WordPress development company, we discuss with our clients if they require a page builder like Eliminator or use our default with Advanced Custom Fields and versatile Content. Some agencies even have clear preferences for organizing the fields within the admin panel and what field types to use for elements like sliders, excerpts, and post lists.
Expectations transcend just the technical aspects and requirements of an internet site project. Therefore, it might be best to debate your expectations of the collaboration along with your white label partner.
-Speed: how briskly does one expect your web developer to finish a project? Please provide samples of previous tasks and websites you’ve done and the way long they took to finish.
-Capacity: what percentage of projects does one have in parallel that you just must complete? What level of development experience is required to realize them?
-Availability: does one have to have access to a developer on short notice, or are projects always planned? does one need immediate assistance, or does one handle urgent requests internally?
-Communication: does one prefer to chat along with your developers often or schedule meetings? Should they reach out as soon as they need an issue or collect them in batches to avoid interrupting your team?
These items can become issues if you don’t confirm that you’re on the identical page as your development team.
They may, permanently reasons, have different assumptions on how you’d like things to be done. What’s evident for you'll be a rare practice among their other clients.
STEP 2: progressing to know the white label team
A white label partnership is, in essence, an upscale sort of vendor-buyer relationship. It thus requires establishing just that: a relationship.
Starting a relationship purely over email isn't a decent idea.
There’s such a lot of communication that happens in verbal and even visual communication. So ensure to induce on calls, especially video calls, together with your white label development partner to urge to grasp them. And to allow them to get to understand you.
Misunderstandings are absolute to happen, and when it does, you’ll be lots more tempted to urge on a call to resolve them if you recognize the person on the opposite side of the decision.
Emails tend to worsen any hiccup within the relationship and definitely don’t help build mutual affection and respect in how video calls and physical meetings do.
You don’t just become great friends together with your partner, but we encourage you to travel a bit deeper than simply discussing work.
In many of our long-term relationships with digital agencies, it sounds like we work for an identical company.
STEP 3: Agreeing on a primary assignment
The first assignment should be chosen carefully. a standard mistake is to place your partner to the test immediately.
I understand that it's tempting to “make sure they're pretty much as good as they claim they are” before investing an excessive amount within the relationship.
However, the primary few projects are essential to induce through the training curve and make sure the expectations are fully covered and understood.
Therefore, we always ensure the primary assignments we tackle with a replacement digital agency are well within the traditional scope of projects.
That way, all the “other things” besides the developer’s technical skills may be sorted out first. After that, we welcome a challenge to point out what we will do.
We also recommend assigning a primary project with touch overtime before it has to be delivered to your client.
That leaves room for us to double-check the work we do against your requirements (that could also be unaccustomed to the developer), and that we have time to correct any mistakes and misunderstandings.
STEP 4: Progress
As the first project is underway, there are certainly visiting be some questions that your development partner has to ask.
Also, you’re probably desperate to study their reach get the primary indication that they're going to be up to the task.
We usually schedule a gathering after a pair of days, where we collect questions for clarification and discuss how far we've got on the project.
If possible, we start the project with whatever is “the most uncertain” within the project to indicate our proposal and find feedback before continuing.
For example, the backend setup or a particular front-end animation can be difficult to write down a certain specification for upfront.
STEP 5: Post-mortem on the primary assignment
After the primary assignment is completed, you ought to have another meeting with time for discussions.
This time, you'll discuss everything from technical execution to pricing and the way the communication worked throughout the project.
For us, this is often where we review and extend our documentation on how our new partner wants their projects done.
What did we miss after we started this project? What did we learn that we must always do for them specifically on their next build?
The next few projects will likely even be a part of the onboarding process, but gradually you'll reduce the discussions and progress reports to a cushy level for you within the long term.
CONCLUSION
The onboarding process is critical to success when working with a replacement white label web development company.
We’ve seen this first hand and learned the way to set ourselves–and the agency–up for fulfillment. However, missing any of the things we covered during this article will result in issues that may cause parting ways within the worst-case scenario.
The most important takeaway from this text is that you just have to think through what expectations you have got on your development partner, even people who could seem obvious to you.
The list we provided will go a protracted way because it helps resolve the items we all know to be the foremost common problems in new white label web development partnerships.
