SelectFew is a relatively simple idea, that was created by a founder and executive, for founders and executives. Zack had experienced the rollercoaster ride of modern marketing, of:
- Attempting to hire marketers for his business internally, but finding the process to be prohibitively expensive. It also limited the amount of genuine specialty he could work with and manage, leading to an over-priced and over-generalist group. Forced to look to what's next, he:
- Trusted that marketing agencies must price their retainer fees in accordance to their ability to actually help grow the business. This mistake is only compounded when bigger agencies (often with creative ways of packaging a traditional retainer fee) convince you that their higher retainers will save you from the already-costly ones you're pouring down the drain at present. It never does. This isn't because agencies are filled with crooks - it's the nature of the core model. By definition, agencies need to use the least amount possible of your marketing dollars to actually grow your business, because the difference in between your retainer/fees and your operational costs is their profit margin. This sets the companies' priorities at odds from day 1, and leads to thousands of micro-decisions that bloat budgets, cut corners, and shroud the program in an ethical gray-cloud. When you have finally had enough, the final choice available to you today is to:
- Find, onboard, train, build systems to pay, and manage an ever-growing hodge-podge of freelancers and boutique agencies. Some may be good at what they do, but most won't be. And even when you do get a good group together, pushing the marketing program forward in synchronized manner with so many disparate parts is a full-time job of its own. So, even if you happen to get a great group of freelance specialists together, you'll find yourself either unable to find time to work on your business, or looking to hire a generalist marketing manager internally to manage the program.
Sound familiar?
There had to be a better way to work with cost-efficient yet high-performing freelance marketing specialists, in a way that was organized, consistent, and on-brand. And there is: SelectFew.
At SelectFew, each client is paired with a trusty 🙋♀️ SelectFew Strategist🙋♂️, a full-time internal member of our team here in the US. Each strategist is an experienced (most have MBA's) marketer with 6+ years of growth experience, and who only works with up to three clients - that means no more dealing with an agency account manager who is serving 15+ clients at once and only has time to read through a deck of numbers with you once a week.
Your Strategist plugs into your business right away (on Slack or Teams, on team meetings, etc), and dives into the analytics, creative assets, consumer behavior, industry research, and team interviews that will help them put together an Action Plan that addresses both short-term fixes, and a long-term growth plan that actually fits your business.
Once you align with your strategist on the program that will unlock your business' scaled growth, the SelectFew operations team will provide strategist-recommended options for freelance or boutique agency specialists from the intensely-vetted SelectFew Expert Network.
Your strategist then manages those experts for you day-to-day in on on-going basis, and reports on the entire process. While they're doing that, they:
- Organize and track your growth experiments across channels
- Take the lead on your website CRO and run your A/B tests
- Ensure your experts stay on-budget, report hours honestly, and are synchronized with the other pieces of your marketing program
This means that you have an experienced marketer to manage, work to improve, and report on a completely flexible marketing team of specialists for a fraction of the cost of hiring internally or working with an agency.
Every SelectFew Expert sets their own rates so that we can all judge value vs cost, but there is never a mark-up, or the traditional agency mentality of "how little can we pay this freelancer for this service, and how much can we charge a client?" The cost for each expert is the same as if you found, interviewed, trained and managed them all on your own.
What's the best part? Everything at SelectFew is month-to-month, and can be flexed, switched, and improved to continue to fit your business perfectly even as you scale and grow (or pivot, or shrink, etc). Your SelectFew program grows up as your business does - which is why we still run programs for clients who brought us on at the seed-stage, and have now gone on to raise $150m+ Series D funding rounds.