What are “Starter Stacks” (and why you should care)

What if you’re a marketing agency or consultant that doesn’t do design-heavy work? Perhaps you’re focused on delivering strategy…but your client needs to refresh the design of their website for your strategy to work.

Or, maybe you’re a consultant who focuses on executing a specific tactic for your clients. But, your client needs to update their technology in order to successfully implement your recommendations.

What do you do?

You could explain to the client how to do it…but they are unlikely to follow through.

You could refer them to someone else…but then your client has to open up yet another relationship and complete a separate project (and you don’t get paid on the work you’ve done).

You could do the implementation yourself…but if it’s not your main focus, it’s going to be a PITA and probably not great (the “designer’s eye” is a real thing, for instance).

The idea that every specialty exists in a vacuum is obviously wrong. As you get to work on your one thing with any client, you will inevitably see myriad other opportunities for improvement.

With Starter Stacks, BlockStep Partnership gives you the means to expand your impact, boost your profit, and deliver huge value to your clients.

• You can be the single relationship to knock out multiple categories of work that make your expertise more valuable
• You can deliver successful tech implementation – that multiplies the impact of your expertise – even when it’s outside of your wheelhouse
• You can charge more (and keep more of it) by offering “Done-for-You” service to implement your recommendations for your clients…without having to get your hands dirty actually doing it

This isn’t only about expanding the impact of your expertise or billing more. Your clients will love this because it makes their life simpler. Yes, it saves them money. But the real costs of dealing with multiple providers are the mental overhead, complexity, time drain and coordination costs.

Real business owners know the cost is much higher than the cumulative fees. If you can simplify, you can charge significantly more…and make your clients significantly happier at the same time.

Example: Starter Sites
Why start a website project from scratch when you can start at 80% done (or more)? When you (and your client) need a site that is effective but not avant-garde, you can grab a complete, working starter site as a foundation for you project.

(Even some big agencies with expensive designers on staff start here…shhhhh). Starter sites feature:

• Clean modern design
• Mobile optimized
• Fully Customizable
• Extendable
• Connected
• Integrate with other systems like email, ecommerce, membership, and more

These aren’t themes or skins or hosted sitebuilder nonsense; they are complete websites that you control 100%, ready for you to customize and extend to suit your project. Whether you want to simply tweak colors, fonts, and photos to call it done or you need to add custom post types, exotic design elements, or layer on membership and e-commerce stores, starter sites will get you there faster and for less cost.

Starter stacks you can access as a BlockStep Partner:

BlockStep Start Stacks are more than just web development. For instance:

• Configurations of marketing tech stacks – for example, start with an integrated stack of ESP/CRM, and e-commerce platform with all the major automations pre-configured
• Workflows we’ve built – Do you need a pre-configured set of automations or data flows? Check our library to get a head start.
• Information Architecture – Is your client’s info architecture a mess? You can grab a starter stack with pre-configured info architecture to make the move simple
• Ops Hubs – We (and our Partner Community) often share our own ops hubs and platforms – from notion setups to project management systems to our contract, billing, and ops processes.

Starter Stacks can get you to success faster. But, if you can’t find what you need, you can always loop us in to help you develop something new for your client. Our mission is to be your ally in delivering more value to your clients.

For Consultants

As part of our Custom Process development, we can build you your own unique, proprietary Starter Stack.

We’ve helped consultants:

• Create a new, high-ticket “done-for-you” offer with a proprietary Starter Stack
• Deliver adjacent projects under their strategic guidance to multiply the impact for their clients
• Pre-configure their preferred tech stacks so that implementation can be a “fill-in-the-blank” exercise for an admin

And more. If you’re a consultant interested in exploring your own Starter Stack and Custom Process development, book a call with us today.