The desire to genuinely make a difference and create an impact often marks the beginning of professional endeavors that begin to shift industry norms and shake up outdated practice. With this deeply ingrained sense of purpose, thousands of industry leaders have cooked up innovative solutions, often by simply bringing the customer back to the center of the scope.
In the case of Zack Holland, the disruptive CEO and founder of SelectFew, that drive to bring honesty and flexibility to a rigid and opaque marketing industry was too strong to ignore; and it has led to both profound business growth and successful clients.
After witnessing firsthand the devastating effects that bloated agency programs can have on promising startups and small businesses, as both a former founder and an agency director, Holland became determined to build something authentically different. The current business models utilized by standard marketing agencies rely on charging high retainer fees, while utilizing tiny fractions of those fees to actually service clients, leading to inherently misaligned priorities, Holland argues. And as the margin between retainer and service is necessary for oversized company overhead, agencies and clients are bound for trouble from day 1.
On a mission to address these and other clear issues in the business landscape, Holland signed himself up for the challenge of creating a platform that upholds integrity and promotes trust, while creating high-performing growth marketing systems.
Fueled by the simple vision of actually giving clients their money’s worth, he built SelectFew, an innovative and rapidly growing marketing startup that combines the guidance of experienced in-house strategists with the flexibility and cost-efficiency of a vetted expert freelancer network.
With SelectFew, companies ranging from pre-seed startups to the Fortune 500 are able to craft bespoke distributed teams that actually fit their current needs, instead of being sold the service of the day by an agency with a single speciality.
The simple beauty of Holland’s system is found in the dedicated SelectFew Strategist, who functions as a fractional growth marketing manager to work with client teams and develop a professional, fitting growth plan.
Strategists then activate and manage the necessary experts from the company’s thoroughly-screened freelancer community to fulfill needs from design and copywriting to technical SEO and Facebook Advertising. It is a managed, human-centric approach to outsourced marketing that naturally blends agency-style guidance with freelancer flexibility.
The pricing model is innovative as well, as freelance experts in the SelectFew network charge clients the same fees as if the company found, onboarded, and managed them on their own; SelectFew simply charges a standard flat referral fee across the network. This unique pricing model abandons the need for either mark-ups, or for circumventing the system, both of which are standard issues with agencies and freelancer platforms.
As a result, SelectFew’s robust and quickly-growing client list can rely on nimble, specialized, and accountable distributed marketing teams that actually match their business needs at a fraction of the costs of traditional marketing agencies. And since the entire system is month-to-month, the accountability to perform at high-levels remains constant.
Holland shared that he created SelectFew in an effort to create high-performing marketing teams that utilize the wealth of talent in today’s distributed freelance industry. He added that a major driver in the decision to start the company lies in the hope of bringing consistent, high-quality jobs to the thousands of talented and creative freelancers seeking client work beyond the industry’s standard structures and the small, temporary jobs found on most platforms.
Results have spoken for themselves, with the company recently blowing past $2M in revenue in only six months since launch and clients that include notable startups, rapid-growth D2C brands and sizable corporations alike. With programs that are entirely transparent, free from mark-ups and white-labeling, and completely flexible, the company has given industry players a glimpse of what Holland claims all of marketing will eventually become.
In the coming years, SelectFew’s managed-distributed systems™ will surely be more of the norm, as the blend of agency guidance with freelancer flexibility is a natural progression of the industry. With no plans of slowing down anytime soon, the company will continue to work with clients of all shapes and sizes to develop creative, accountable growth systems.
Learn more about SelectFew at their website here.
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