Built for the agencies we'd want to work with anyway.
White-label, co-branded, or referral — the structure flexes to your relationship. What stays constant: your client never knows we exist unless you want them to.
The agencies we partner with best.
Strong specialty firms whose clients keep asking for web and AI work — and who'd rather partner with a peer than build that capability in-house. Three agency types we work with most:
Video & Film Production
Studios producing brand films, campaign content, and documentary work whose clients want the website that hosts the story too.
Performance Marketing
Paid media and growth agencies whose campaigns deserve landing pages and attribution stacks that actually convert and measure what's working.
Management Consulting
Strategy firms whose clients leave engagements with PowerPoint roadmaps — but need an operational partner to actually build the AI and digital workflows the strategy calls for.
Not on this list but think we'd fit? PR/comms, branding shops, and law firms have also been good partners. Reach out.
Three ways to partner. You pick the shape.
Most agencies start with white-label, then evolve into co-branded or referral as the relationship deepens. We'll work with whatever model fits your client posture best.
White-label
We work entirely behind your brand. Your client never knows we exist. Deliverables, emails, status reports, code repositories — all under your name.
Co-branded
We appear alongside you. Your client sees both names. Useful when the AI/web work is meaningful enough that credibility benefits from both signatures — without surrendering the relationship.
Referral
You introduce us, we take over the engagement entirely. You earn a referral fee on close. Useful when the scope is outside your core practice and you'd rather hand it off cleanly than half-deliver it.
Four phases. No surprises.
The same flow regardless of which model you pick. We've structured it so the operational reality is clear from day one — for you, and for your client if they're involved.
Private intro
You and a Tripleskinny principal on a 30-min call. Brief us on the client, the scope, and the model. Mutual NDA signed before specifics.
Scope & price
We send a partner rate card and proposed scope within 72 hours. You add margin, repackage under your brand if white-label, and present to your client.
Deliver behind you
Weekly working calls with you. Email, code, and assets all under your brand. Your client only ever talks to you unless co-branded.
Handoff & care
Launch in production. Documentation handed to your team. Optional ongoing care retainer for site updates, agent tuning, monitoring.
What you handle. What we handle.
We've been on both sides of agency partnerships that fell apart. The most common cause was ambiguity about who owned what. So we draw the line in writing on day one.
The relationship.
- Client communication. All emails, calls, deliverables flow through you unless co-branded.
- Scope decisions. You decide what we build. You negotiate timeline shifts. You approve change orders.
- Strategic direction. The "why" of the engagement — your strategy work, your discovery, your roadmap.
- Account management. Status reports, billing, retainer renewals, expansion conversations.
- Brand voice & positioning. If it lives under your brand, the brand voice stays yours.
The build.
- Design & development. Visual design, UX, frontend, backend, infrastructure, deployment.
- AI implementation. Agents, automations, attribution stacks, model selection, tuning.
- Technical decisions. Stack choices, security architecture, hosting, performance. We bring the technical accountability.
- QA & testing. Cross-browser, cross-device, accessibility, load testing — done before handoff.
- Documentation. Your team gets clear technical docs at handoff, written for humans not just developers.
What we'll never do.
The fears that quietly kill partnerships before they start. We address them in writing, and we mean it.
We won't poach your client
Not during the engagement, not after, not ever. Your client list is sacred. We won't initiate contact about follow-up work, expansion projects, or "have you considered..." pitches. Contractually enforced.
We won't name your clients
Not in our case studies, not on our website, not in pitches to other agencies. If you want us to mention the work, we will — only with your written approval. Otherwise we describe it generically or not at all.
We won't undercut you
If your client comes to us direct after a successful partnership, we'll refer them back to you. No sneaking around the side door. The trust you built is what got the deal done — that's yours to keep.
We won't make you look bad
Your reputation is in our hands during the engagement. If we miss a deadline, miss a deliverable, or screw up — that lands on us, and we'll tell your client (with your permission) before they hear it from anywhere else.
We won't pitch competing agencies
If you're a film production studio in our partnership, we won't take on another film production studio partnership in your specific market segment without telling you first. Conflicts of interest get disclosed, not buried.
We won't change the deal mid-flight
The margin, the scope, the timeline, the model — all locked in writing before kickoff. Changes happen, but they're negotiated. We don't pull rate-card surprises three weeks in.
What a real partnership looks like.
Not a specific partner — a composite drawn from how engagements actually unfold. Identifying details fictionalized.
A 14-person performance marketing agency's largest client asked them to build a website with embedded AI chat.
The agency had been running paid media for a regional mortgage broker for two years. The client wanted to overhaul the website and add an AI agent on the landing pages to capture and qualify after-hours leads. The agency owner's instinct was to politely decline — they were paid media specialists, not web builders. But declining meant the client would shop the work to another agency, risking the existing relationship.
We came in as the white-label web/AI partner. The agency presented the proposal under their brand with our cost plus their markup baked in. We did discovery directly with the client — but on calls the agency owner attended. Six weeks later the site launched. Groupie is now live on every landing page the agency runs media to.
The agency owner kept the client, deepened the retainer by 40%, and is now using "we have a dedicated web & AI partner" as a positioning advantage with new prospects. Their lead engineer didn't have to learn React. Their account team didn't have to babysit a build.
How the economics work.
Every agency partnership is different — your overhead, your client base, your appetite for margin all vary. So we negotiate the financial structure per relationship rather than forcing one model. Here's how the conversation usually goes.
Margin structure
We negotiate the structure per partnership. Common shapes: a partner rate card you mark up however you want, a wholesale net rate you resell at your standard pricing, or a referral percentage on closed engagements.
What stays constant: we're transparent about our costs. You won't find a hidden markup three layers deep. If you want to know what we charge a direct client, we'll tell you on the call.
Paperwork stance
We sign your paper, not ours. Your MSA, your NDA, your subcontractor agreement — we'll review and sign rather than insisting you accept our boilerplate. You know your client's expectations better than we do.
For the partnership itself: a simple two-page Partnership Memo with margin structure, communication protocol, IP ownership, and non-solicit language. Reviewable by your counsel before signing.
IP & ownership
Code, designs, documentation — your client owns it on delivery. Standard work-for-hire terms. We don't retain ongoing rights to anything we build for your engagements.
The exception is reusable components and patterns from our shared library. We make those available to all clients, including yours — the engagement-specific work is theirs alone.
Payment terms
We invoice you, you invoice your client. Standard 30-day net terms with us. We don't make you wait on your client's payment cycle — once work is delivered, our clock starts independent of yours.
For long engagements: 50% deposit, milestone payments thereafter. For retainer work: monthly upfront, terminable with 30 days notice.
Let's talk privately.
30 minutes. We'll walk through the model that fits, the kind of work you'd send our way, and the relationship math. No deck, no pitch — just two agencies figuring out if we should work together.
Reach out →Or email partnerships@tripleskinny.com directly.