Subcontracting / white-label delivery
Hiring another person or agency to do client work you remain responsible for, sometimes entirely under your own brand.
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What it is
Subcontracting is hiring another person or company to perform some of the client work you remain responsible for. White-label delivery is the version where that work appears under your agency's brand and the delivery partner stays behind the scenes. They overlap, but they are not synonyms: a subcontractor can be introduced to the client, and a white-label partner can deliver an entire service line. The label half of the name is literal: goods made for resale shipped with a blank white label so whoever sold them could print their own on it, which is still how supermarket own brands reach the shelf.
Reach for it when demand exceeds your capacity or a project needs a specialty your core team lacks. Put the scope, deadline, fee, review process, confidentiality, ownership of work, and rules for client contact in writing. Check the client contract first, because it may require consent before work is delegated.
Gotcha: the client still holds you accountable for quality and dates. A cheap quote from the subcontractor is not your margin until you count briefing, review, revisions, and rework. Starting without a clean ownership chain can also leave you promising rights to the client that your subcontractor never gave you. Under US copyright law, paying an independent contractor does not by itself make you the owner: outside a short list of commissioned categories with a signed work-for-hire agreement, the contractor keeps the copyright until they assign it in writing.
Ask AI for it
Draft a subcontractor agreement and operating checklist for the client project below, formatted for DocuSign with a signature block that carries named signer, signature, and date fields for both parties. Include countable deliverables, dates, fee and payment trigger, revision limit, acceptance criteria, confidentiality, transfer of the rights needed for client delivery, rules for portfolio use, whether the subcontractor may contact the client, and whether the arrangement is white-label. Add a handoff workflow with named owner, review gate, file location, and escalation path. Flag any client-contract clause that must be checked before delegating work, and do not invent its wording.