From startup to $585K in revenue from the Vendasta Marketplace
Based in Wasilla, Alaska
All-in-one digital marketing agency established in 2012
Specializing in digital marketing for private and charter schools
Mitchell Slater started his digital marketing agency on his own when he was 17 years old. He’ll be the first to tell you he didn’t really know what he was doing back then. By the time he was in his early 20s, he knew he needed help to take his agency to the next level. In 2015, he started searching online for a solution.
What was he looking for? He wasn’t completely sure.
But that’s when he came across Vendasta, which offered software that could help agencies like his.
Grow your agency with Vendasta’s software, support,
and white-label products
gross annual
marketplace revenue
engaged
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client retention
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Background
After three months, the company moved on to start creating fundraising products that schools and organizations could sell at a profit instead. By 2012, after two years of experiencing highs and lows, the business was relaunched with a new name —Slater Strategies. The company shifted its focus to digital marketing strategies to help businesses grow online.
Objectives
For years, Slater was doing it all on his own: managing an agency while completing all the delivery work, too. It was time to find software and support to take his agency to the next level.
By partnering with Vendasta, Slater hoped to:
- Grow from startup to established agency
- Offer a wider variety of digital marketing products
- Find support as a single owner/operator
The approach
Marketing Services
As a solopreneur, Slater relied heavily on Vendasta’s white-label digital marketing team to strategically grow his agency early on. He knew he couldn’t continue to be the only one delivering services if he was going to scale and take on more clients.
Having a white-label marketing services team in his corner to complete delivery work, he was confident he could grow quickly with the additional resources he now had under his belt.
Today, Slater has taken many of the services in house, but he still uses Vendasta’s Website Pro managed WordPress hosting to host more than 35 client websites.
Vendasta Marketplace
Early on, the Vendasta Marketplace allowed Slater to offer products he couldn’t have offered otherwise, enabling him to branch out, attract more clients, and generate more revenue.
Slater explains, “I used to outsource SEO to Alpha SEO and Boostability until I got to the point where it made financial sense to have an internal team do everything instead. Now, my internal SEO team still uses the Hike SEO platform tool through Marketplace.”
He goes on to say, “It’s still nice to have those resources ready and available if we ever do need them again.”
Brandable client portal
Slater uses the Executive Reports regularly to show proof-of-performance. He appreciates that the white-label client reporting software automatically puts together the data and sends it out to clients, either weekly or monthly.
Slater says, “It gives me something to show clients without having to go in and pull analytics. The Executive Reports have all the data in one spot, which saves us a lot of time.”
Partner success support
Slater appreciates having a partner success representative to touch base with on anything he needs during their weekly calls. It’s nice to have an internal partner success team to jump in and help if there’s ever a bug, an issue, or an emergency. “It’s cool to have a [Vendasta representative] on your side and in your corner. That’s a huge plus that I really like with Vendasta,” says Slater.
He goes on to explain how important it was for him to connect with the Vendasta team in person years ago at a Conquer Local Conference. He says, “The biggest leap of growth for me with Vendasta was attending the conference in Banff a few years ago. Meeting people from Vendasta was a huge piece of growth for me. I had a lot of support and people in my corner after that. Being able to connect with other agency owners there and learn from each other was another huge piece that helped with growth.”
Best-selling products:
Domains
Website Pro
SEO
The result
gross annual
marketplace revenue
engaged accounts
client retention
rate
The numbers
Slater Strategies was able to grow from a solopreneur startup agency to a successful all-in-one digital marketing agency with a large internal team of 13 employees.
Slater Strategies has generated over $585,000 in gross marketplace revenue since becoming a Vendasta partner, with a 98% account retention rate and 436 engaged accounts.
Looking forward
To do that, the company will need more hosting capabilities for additional client websites. Slater plans to continue to use Vendasta’s website hosting services, Website Pro. Not having to worry about having his own server to manage and keep up with offers a lot of value.
Slater also appreciates knowing he can offer more than 250 digital products and services through Vendasta’s SaaS marketplace platform to help him meet any new client’s needs.
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