IAM938- CEO Provides a True End-to-end White Label Solution

Ken Knorr is the CEO and founder of the white-label digital marketing company “That Company”. Yes, the company name is That Company. For over a decade he’s built a company that supports marketing firms in providing high-quality SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Reputation Management services all under their respective brands.

With over 400+ agencies partners, That Company has become the most widely trusted name in white label services, that provides a true end-to-end white label solution that’s scalable. Ken is a leader who believes that 1+1=3. Through his consensus through debate leadership style, he believes the best solutions are created with his team, not just by himself.

• CEO Hack: Routines
• CEO Nugget: Change your mental attitude to change everything
• CEO Defined: Teacher- teaching those around me how I think and make decisions

Website: http://thatcompany.com/

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Transcription

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[00:00:18.39] – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

[00:00:47.70] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Ken Noor from that company, Ken. It's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:55.20] – Ken Knorr

Hey. It's great to be here, Gresh. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:57.70] – Gresham Harkless

No problem. Super excited to have you on. And what I wanted to do is just read a little bit more about Ken so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's go he's doing. And Ken is CEO and founder of the white label digital marketing company, That Company. Yes. That the company is literally that company. For over a decade, he's built a company that supports marketing firms and providing high quality SEO, PPC, social media, and reputation management services all under their respective brands.

With over four hundred plus agency partners, that company has become the most widely trusted name in white label services that provides a true end to end white label solution that's scalable. Ken is a leader who believes that one plus one equals three, and through his consensus and and through his consensus through debate leadership style, he believes that the best solutions are created with his team, not just by himself. Ken, great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:42.29] – Ken Knorr

Man. Absolutely. Perfect.

[00:01:44.59] – Gresham Harkless
Well, let's do it then. So to kinda kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more on how you got started. Could you take us through what I call your CEO story? Will that you get started with the business?

[00:01:52.09] – Ken Knorr

I I was born no. I'm kidding. We won't go back that far, will we? So I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've been, you know, always interested in in, running my own business, And I've had a mixed bag. Many of my early, endeavors were failures, but I don't look at them as failures. I look at them as, learning opportunities. Then I, kinda took a stint in corporate America for a little while, and joined a fairly large organization. And while I was there, I I was very instrumental in in blowing that organization, up.

When I joined them, they were, fifty employees. When I left them, I had over two hundred in my chain of command. And so we had taken them from a roughly a fifty million dollar organization to almost a three hundred million dollar organization. And so, and I and I really kinda did that through what I had discovered, through digital marketing in those days. Then I decided, you know what? I've done it and I kind of learned a lot from that. And I decided to go and hang my shingle out, you know, thirteen, almost fourteen years ago now, in the digital marketing space. And that's the the latest endeavor was, was that.

Started fourteen years ago, and and it has been a, a rocket ride. We started in, two thousand seven. And by two thousand ten, Inc five hundred or Inc Magazine had ranked us number one eighty three in the fastest growing companies, right into the middle of the pack of, Inc five hundred companies. And, it's it's been a an amazing, amazing experience and, you know, learned a lot and still learning every day. You know, still learning. I think that that for me is is what it's all about, learning. Right? Applying what you what you did yesterday until what you're gonna do tomorrow.

[00:03:58.00] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. At the end of the day is what it all kinda comes down to. And I love how you talked about that rocky ride because it definitely feels like, you know, entrepreneurship can be that, I often will say, a roller coaster ride in the ups and downs. But I think Yes. If you have that mentality of always being learning, then that allows you to understand that you can always kinda go forward. There's always another opportunity to to to better, to grow, to to do so many different things.

[00:04:17.30] – Ken Knorr

It's true, Gresh. There was I don't I can't tell you I guess I can look it up. I could Google it, right? But it was an old saying, where they the saying says an expert is and this is, like, from the seventeen hundreds. An expert is the man in his field who has made all the mistakes there are to make. And that's true because you can't become an expert without having made mistakes.

I can have a great idea. And I could maybe even get lucky in that great idea and I've got some ideas on how something should work and I go off and I can do that. But when you make mistakes and you learn from them see, it's not that I know what to do, it's I know what not to do. Right? And there's so many of that, you know, opportunities to to, you know, go back, well, I've learned from all those. And and you just keep stacking it on and you just keep stacking it on. And and that's that that is really how you use the term level up. That is exactly how you level up to just keep learning. Right?

[00:05:20.50] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And I did look up the name. Niels Borer was who said that, and it's, one of those things that if you can kind of tap into that and do that regularly, that it really, allows you to understand that there's always a next level, there's always a process, and you look at it as more of a marathon than an actual destination. And so I know you you've had different, you know, companies and organizations that you you started, and I know we're talking about that company. Could you take us through a little bit more about what you do? And for people that might be listening and not, familiar with the term white label, could you talk a little bit more about that too?

[00:05:48.80] – Ken Knorr

I can. So let's start with what the white label is. So we're a white-label digital marketing firm. What does that mean? It means that we provide services for other agencies, and, we provide those services to those agencies' clients, and the clients don't know that we exist. So we may do search engine optimization or pay per click management or all of the different things you mentioned earlier. And, the end client, as we call it, has no idea that it's not the agency themselves that's providing it, that they've they've outsourced to us to provide that services.

But the I think the the thing that differentiates us from other, and I'm using air quotes right now, other white label companies is that we actually interact directly with the client. What we saw in the industry and what we know a lot of again air quotes white label companies do is that they do the work for you, but they leave the agency to have to talk to the customer about the work. So it's it's very difficult to scale especially for a solopreneur or a smaller agency.

It means that they have to have the meeting with the customer and then come back to the white label and say, the customer wants this. And then the white label says, well, what about this? And then they have to go back to the customer and say, well, what about this? And then they have to come back to the white label and go, well, they said that. And then so you get stuck in the middle of the communication. And we're all familiar with the telephone game as a kid where we whisper a secret around. And before long, what is said is not heard at the very end. And so we cut all that out.

Our team members and our staff members are all highly trained, really smart, intelligent people who interact directly with the client, and the client has no idea that they're not interacting with the brand. And so that kinda sets us apart. We truly do white label our services rather than just outsource, which is what I think a lot of other white labels say that they, they do. They just really outsource and you end up doing it. That gives you the ability to scale because as a CEO or a small agency owner, you know if you've gotta sit in every meeting and that doesn't work well, there's you have a limited capacity on how often you can do that. So that's what the white label is. At least that's what white label is in our eyes.

The true meaning of white label is that you're able to, you know, step away from having to be in the middle of that. So how do we get started? And what is the story maybe a little bit of that company? In o seven, we started out, not as a white label organization. We started as a digital marketing firm. And in fact, we started out in a niche, in home building and new home builders and construction, and was the worst mistake I could have made. But it wasn't a mistake in o seven because in o eight, the whole building industry crashed and burned. And so we had to do a pivot. And so we pivoted and said we're gonna become agnostic. We're gonna work on, you know, pretty much any industry.

And so we are SEO company dot com, and we're p p c management dot com, and we're rep management dot com in addition to being that company dot com. In in that early year, in two thousand and eight, the very next year, we had, an SEO firm out of New York City call us because at the time we were really every very heavily around PPC management and pbcmanagement dot com. And we were doing a lot of pay-per-click work for clients in Google Ads. In that time in those days, it was AdWords and and whatnot. But they called us and said, hey. Look. We do SEO, but we don't do pay per click.

Would you work an arrangement for us to be able to do, you know, pay-per-click for our clients? And so that's where we built that customer relationship. The very first thing, our first white label customer was and their needs were we don't have people who can be on the phone. We need you to do that. And so we built our entire model around that. And by twenty eleven, they had seventy five clients with us and we were off and rolling. In twenty fifteen, I won't go into the all the details, but in twenty fifteen, we decided that we were really gonna pivot again. We were gonna double down and push everything into our white label relationships Rather than go out and hunt for business directly, we would just, we would focus on our white label partnerships.

And at that time, time, we had three. That original company that had joined us in ‘eight and seven years later, we'd added on two more. Not that we had been out looking for them. They had just kind of found us. But we thought this was a good space for us. And in, today, like you mentioned in my introduction, we have over four hundred agency partners. We are one hundred percent committed to the white-label space. We're a white label Internet marketing firm now, and we don't go and hunt direct business at all.

You know, occasionally, somebody will call us we'll and we'll work with them, but we'd rather actually refer them through one of our partners, especially if they need a service that we don't offer. Like, we don't do web design or development, and they need web design and development. I'd rather refer them through a trusted partner who I'm gonna work with and provide the services, that we provide while our partners provide their core services, whatever they may be. So that gives you does that answer the question you're looking for to understand?

[00:11:23.29] – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. No. I appreciate you for breaking that down. I even touched on, the secret sauce and what what I what you feel kinda set you apart and did you definitely hear that you take it a step further. It's not just kinda behind the scenes, but also working in tandem is huge because it allows the organizations and the and the people and, you know, whatever services they might provide to be able to be in their zone of genius and know that their clients are still getting the quality of the services that you provide. So I absolutely, appreciate that. And I wanted to switch gears a little bit. Sure. And I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:11:58.10] – Ken Knorr

For me as a as an individual and that me as a CEO is, is routines and, a morning routine. I almost don't even like to call it a routine because a routine doesn't really, explain the depth of and the importance that I consider to have. So I almost call it a ritual. It's this thing that I do every day and the way that I start my day out that launches my day for me. And I think that you build that you build a routine, and it could be completely custom for you or a ritual for you of what that is.

[00:12:35.29] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I appreciate those hacks. And so I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you hopped into into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

[00:12:47.29] – Ken Knorr

If I were to pick one, I've got so many little things that I've collected, throughout the years, which ones are important and and whatnot. I'll give you the one that is kind of, it's a it's a it was a little bit of a game changer for me. Both my kids are grown now, but when I coached them, I would say to them, you know, or coached them out on the field.

I was a coach and they played soccer and football and basketball were their three main sports. And I would pull them off the field every now and then, and I would say to them, we you know, the difference we have to make in this game is six inches. We just have to change six inches.

And the first time I would tell them that the first time I told each of them that, they were like, what's six inches? You just shoot six inches to the right or the no. And I would pick my hand up and hold my index fingers up on both my hands and I would put them on my temples and point it and point at my head and say it's that six inches. It's six inches between your temples. If you can just change your mental attitude, you can change everything.

[00:13:52.70] – Gresham Harkless

I love that nugget. Yeah. So, I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO, and we're hoping that different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Ken, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:14:03.10] – Ken Knorr

My definition of a CEO, comes from me doing what's called the 03:60, which is where I, I ask all my, people that report to me, my stakeholders, to say, what are the things that you that I need to work on? Right? What do I need to improve? And, so I'm constantly on that journey for trying to make myself better, learn from my mistakes. And so at the moment, the definition of a CEO is that of a teacher. I need to, today, be less about making decisions. This is my and where I am in the journey. Less about making decisions than teaching those around me how I make my decisions, teaching those around me, how I think.

[00:14:45.89] – Gresham Harkless

And truly appreciate that definition, and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional we can let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best people can get a hold of you and find out about all those things you and your team are working on.

[00:14:58.60] – Ken Knorr

Sure. So, if you wanna get a hold of me, you can catch me on social media, Twitter, and LinkedIn at Kennorr. That's k e n k n o r r. If you wanna learn more about that company, it's really not that hard to find that company. You'll have a hard time forgetting our brand because we're just that company. So go to that company dot com slash podcast. We typically, run an offer out there of some sort.

You know, even if you're listening to Grusha's podcast here, you know, five years from now, you'll see what's up there and what offer we're throwing out at the moment. But that's a great way, to learn about us. And, if you wanna connect to me, that's, that's the way you connect to me.

Gresh, it was my pleasure, to be here. Your questions were excellent, and they made me think, which, you know, doesn't always happen on a podcast. A lot of the shows I go on, it's just like you're repeating the kind of writing the same stuff that was asked by the last guy, and that tells me that, you, have a unique vision for what you're trying to accomplish here, and it's and I think it's awesome. And I'm and I'm honored to be here, man.

[00:16:08.79] – Gresham Harkless

Definitely. And the honors are all all mine and definitely all ours as well too. So, Ken, I truly appreciate, you know, all the perspective that you provide, the impact and the ripples that you make, you know, in your organization, but in, you know, so many different ways, you know, beyond that. So I appreciate you. Again, we will have the links and information in the show notes to make it even easier for everybody to get a hold of you and find out about all those offers. But thank you so much again, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest day.

[00:16:30.20] – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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