For Partner / Agency: Getting Started in SGEN

How to hit the ground running as a Partner agency

Most agencies were built around WordPress plus a plugin stack. The trade-off got harder year over year. Plugin conflicts, theme rewrites, security patching, hosting headaches — each one ate billable hours that used to be margin. SGEN is the answer for agencies that want to keep building beautiful client sites without burning a third of their time on infrastructure.

The Partner / Agency role is for a digital or design agency delivering sites to outside clients on SGEN. You provision sites, build them, hand them off, and either step down to a maintenance role or keep them on retainer. Three things change your economics: the build cycle drops from weeks to days, the maintenance load drops near zero, and reseller billing converts one-off site fees into recurring revenue.

This guide covers what your partner-tier access includes, how to onboard your team on a sandbox before taking a paid client, the four-phase client delivery flow, the white-label and reseller surfaces, and the retainer cadence that keeps the relationship healthy after launch.

30-second pitch for the role

You ship client sites on a platform that does not fight you. You replicate your starter components across every new project, so the third site is half the build time of the first. You bill clients on your retainer cycle, while SGEN bills you at partner pricing — the spread is your recurring revenue. You hand off cleanly when a client leaves, because every site can be transferred without a database export. The role rewards two muscles: tightening your discovery template, and tightening your reusable component library.

What is this for?

The Partner / Agency role is for an outside service business — a digital agency, a design studio, a freelance team — that builds and operates sites on behalf of clients. You are not the client. You are the team the client hires to ship the site.

Typical scenarios: a local-service business hires you for a five-page lead-generation site; a growing brand hires you to migrate from WordPress to a faster stack; a multi-location franchise hires you to roll out a templated build across thirty sites; or a SaaS company hires you for a marketing site refresh. In each case, you provision the SGEN site, build it inside SG-Builder, hand admin access to the client at launch, and keep a retainer for ongoing work.

Good use cases

• A retail brand wants a new site in three weeks. You apply your agency's starter components, swap content, and ship inside the window.
• A SaaS company is migrating off a WordPress site with twelve plugins. You rebuild on SGEN without the plugin layer and the launch is faster than the migration was budgeted for.
• A franchise rolls out a brand-consistent template across thirty locations. You build one site, save the structure as a reusable library, and the next twenty-nine sites are 70% faster.
• A long-term client wants to take the site in-house after two years. You hand over admin ownership and step down to a quarterly check-in role.
• A new prospect asks for a demo on a real site, not a deck. You spin up a sandbox, build a pitch-quality landing page in two days, and use it as the deal-closing artifact.

What NOT to use this for

• Building speculative sites without scope. A Partner-tier site adds to your monthly bill. Provision after the client signs the spec, not before.
• Sharing client content across other clients. Each client's site is isolated. Do not lift design files, blog posts, or assets from one client to another without explicit written permission.
• Promising platform features that have not shipped. Read the changelog. Sell what is live, not what is planned.
• Skipping QA on staging before push to production. Every site you ship goes through your internal review on the staging URL before the DNS cutover.
• Cutting over DNS late on a Friday. Plan launches for early in the week so the recovery window does not eat your weekend.
• Running a client site without a retainer agreement. Ad-hoc requests after launch are the failure mode. Set the rhythm in writing before the handoff.

How this connects to other features

• For Developer — the role's surface most agency work touches. Custom CSS, Custom Codes, redirects, search-and-replace.
• For Content Editor — the role you hand to clients post-launch. Know the surface they will live in.
• For Platform Admin — when a client wants to run multiple sites under one organization, this is the role they need.
• SGEN Glossary — confirm the platform's language before writing your own discovery docs.
• FAQ — the short answers your client will read when they Google a question. Familiarize yourself so your discovery covers the gaps the FAQ does not.

Before you start

• Your agency has applied for the partner tier and signed the agency agreement.
• A payment method is on file for partner billing — the channel by which SGEN bills your agency.
• You have provisioned at least one sandbox site for internal training and demos.
• Your team has built one end-to-end site in the sandbox before taking a paid client.
• You have an agency Drive (or equivalent) where signed specs and brand assets live.
• You have a standard discovery template ready to send to a prospect.

If any of the above are not in place, stop here. Bringing a paying client onto SGEN before your team has shipped a sandbox end-to-end is the most common cause of a delivery slipping its window.

Where to go

The surfaces a Partner / Agency touches across the portfolio:

You will use the per-site admin most days. You will use the partner dashboard on Mondays (status sweep) and Fridays (billing review).

Steps

1. Provision the sandbox and run one full build end-to-end

Before your first paid client, provision a sandbox site. The sandbox bills at internal rates and exists for training, demos, and pitch artifacts.

Build one site in the sandbox end-to-end: pages, blog, forms, basic SEO, custom branding. Do not skip the unglamorous parts — set up a contact form, route the submission, test the success page, confirm the email arrives.

If any step in the sandbox surprises you, the same surprise on a paid client costs you a week. Treat the sandbox as your team's training ground, not a placeholder for "we will figure it out later."

2. Run discovery and lock the spec before provisioning

A signed spec exists before a paid SGEN site exists.

Discovery answers six questions: pages and sections, integrations (forms, payment, email, analytics), content sources, brand assets, domain ownership, launch date.

Output: a signed spec PDF plus a brand-asset bundle in the agency Drive. The spec is your reference document for the rest of the build — every "did we agree to this?" question gets resolved by reading the spec.

3. Provision the client site and apply your starter library

Open the partner dashboard, click New Client Site, name it for the client, pick a plan tier matching expected traffic and feature use.

Apply your agency starter library as the base. A mature agency starter library saves 60 to 80% of the build time on a typical client site — header, footer, hero patterns, contact-form pattern, blog index, post template, basic SEO defaults.

Configure integrations next (analytics, email, payment if ecommerce). Compose the pages last. Integrations late in the cycle is the common mistake — you end up retrofitting analytics on every page instead of letting the layout reference the tags.

4. Run internal QA on staging, then invite the client for review

Before showing the client anything, your team walks the staging URL end-to-end. Click every navigation link. Submit every form. Read every page on mobile. Confirm tracking pixels fire.

Then invite the client to staging. Give them one consolidated revision window — "reply with all changes by Friday" — not a rolling stream of edits. Apply revisions in one focused pass. Re-QA on staging. Then schedule the cutover.

5. Cut over, verify, hand off, schedule the 30-day check-in

Cutover happens early in the week, off-peak hours for the client's audience. Switch DNS to point at production. Verify on production with the same checklist you ran on staging — forms, payment, tracking, mobile.

Hand admin access to the client at the agreed role. Most clients land at the Content Editor role. Multi-site clients get a Platform Admin.

Schedule the 30-day check-in calendar invite before you close the project. The check-in is when you propose the retainer rhythm if you have not already.

Day-one and first-week path

Use this table to build capability before your first paying client comes on board.

White-labeling and reseller billing

White-label is per-site. For a client who should not see SGEN-branded admin, set the custom logo, sender name, and login URL on their site only. Another client on your portfolio can run with default branding. The two settings do not interact.

Reseller billing converts the build-and-bill model into a managed-service model. You invoice the client directly on your agency cycle (monthly is the typical rhythm). SGEN bills you at partner pricing. The spread between your retail price and the partner rate is the recurring revenue you keep.

A typical mark-up sits between 30 and 60% over partner cost — enough to cover the maintenance retainer commitments your agency makes (uptime monitoring, content updates, monthly analytics review).

Retainer rhythm — the cadence that compounds

A retainer without a defined rhythm decays into ad-hoc requests. Define the rhythm in the contract. A typical agency cadence:

Send a one-page month-end summary every month. The summary is what the client forwards to their CEO when the CEO asks "what are we paying the agency for." Clients with documented value renew. Clients without it leave on a cost review.

Handing off cleanly when a client leaves

When a client decides to take the site in-house, hand it off without resistance. The clean handoff is your reputation.

The handoff checklist:

1. Document what you built. A page-by-page reference, integration credentials, content-source notes.
2. Transfer billing. The client takes over the monthly bill directly with SGEN.
3. Transfer admin ownership. The client's Platform Admin (or designated lead) becomes the site owner.
4. Step down to a lower role, or remove your access entirely if the client requests it.
5. Archive your agency-side spec and component-library reference for future client projects.

Clients who leave gracefully often refer back when their next project needs an agency. Clients who feel held hostage do not.

Day-one checklist — first five things to do

Before you take a paid client, walk this checklist. Each item closes a gap that would surface as a delivery problem later.

1. Confirm partner-tier access in the partner dashboard. Sign in. Confirm the Sites list, Billing, and Library tabs are all visible. If any are missing, contact partner support before continuing.
2. Provision a sandbox site and name it for internal use. Sandbox sites bill at internal rates and exist for training, demos, and pitch artifacts. Name it clearly — "sandbox-q3-pitch," not "test."
3. Build one end-to-end site in the sandbox. Pages, blog, forms, basic SEO, branding. Do not skip the unglamorous parts. The sandbox is your team's training ground.
4. Set up your agency Drive folder structure. One folder per client. Standard sub-folders: spec, brand-assets, screenshots, post-launch notes. The structure compounds — the tenth client is faster to onboard because folders 1-9 taught you the pattern.
5. Write your discovery template. Six questions: pages and sections, integrations, content sources, brand assets, domain ownership, launch date. Lock the template now — editing it per-client is the slow path.

Day-two through week-two progression

The first two weeks are about the agency, not the client. You build internal capability so the first paid client lands on a process, not improvisation.

By end of week two, your agency has shipped one sandbox end-to-end, started on a paid client, and built a library that compounds across every future engagement.

Key surfaces this role uses

Six surfaces carry the agency's daily work. The first three are partner-tier specific. The last three are per-site admin surfaces that you reach into for build work.

• Partner dashboard. All sites in the portfolio, status per site, last-activity timestamp.
• Agency component library. Reusable SG-Builder components saved once, applied across clients.
• Reseller billing. Partner invoices in, client invoices out. Spread is your recurring revenue.
• Per-site admin (any client site). Provisioned with full admin during the build phase.
• SG-Builder editor. Where the page-by-page build happens.
• White-label settings (per site). Branded admin chrome for clients that should not see SGEN-branded login.

Key surfaces this role does NOT use

Three surfaces are off-limits even at partner tier. The boundary exists to protect every other client in the portfolio.

• Another client's content or design files. Each client is isolated. No lifting blog posts, asset libraries, or design files across clients without explicit written permission from both.
• Platform-engineering controls. Deploy state, database state, infrastructure — all stay with SGEN. If a client needs something here, it is an SGEN support request, not an agency action.
• Plan-tier source code. You do not see other partners' rates or client lists. Each agency runs independently.

What success looks like

A healthy state for a Partner / Agency at month 12 looks like:

• Five to fifteen client sites live on SGEN, with a defined retainer agreement on each.
• A mature starter library — header, footer, hero variants, form patterns, blog index, post template, basic SEO defaults — that you apply on every new site.
• A discovery template you reuse for every new client without editing.
• A monthly billing rhythm that shows up in your accounting reports as recurring revenue, not project bursts.
• Two to four sandbox sites you use for pitches, training, and demos.

Common questions for this role

"How many sites can my agency provision?" The partner tier scales with site count. Check the partner-tier pricing for the current ceiling — most agencies grow into a higher tier somewhere between site 5 and site 15.

"Can I move a client off my account if they want to leave?" Yes. The site transfers to the client's own SGEN account. Billing reroutes from your agency to the client directly. No database export, no re-platforming.

"Does white-label hide SGEN from the client's logged-in admin?" You can set the admin logo, sender name, and login URL. The platform name still appears in some areas where SGEN's terms of service and changelog link out. Full corporate disguise is not the goal — the goal is your client seeing your agency at the surfaces that matter most.

"My agency has 30 sites. Should one of my team be a Platform Admin on every client?" Usually yes for active clients. Step down to a lower role on clients that have moved to a "we touch it quarterly" maintenance tier. Audit access every quarter — anyone who has not logged into a client site in 60+ days probably does not need access.

"What if a client refuses to pay partner-cycle billing?" That is the signal the client should be on direct SGEN billing instead of reseller. Restructure the relationship — agency takes a retainer for service hours, client takes the SGEN bill directly.

What to do if it does not work

The site you provisioned is missing surfaces you expect to see.

Plan tier matches feature availability. A Launch-tier site does not have every surface that a Scale-tier site has. Confirm the plan tier matches the spec — and confirm the spec did not promise a feature only available at a higher tier.

Your agency starter library does not apply cleanly to a new client site.

Library compatibility depends on the SGEN version each site is on. If the new site is on a newer minor version, some library components may need a fresh export from a current site. Update the library on a sandbox site first; do not debug on a paid client.

A client's DNS cutover broke the form integration.

Form integrations often depend on the live domain. Re-confirm the form's destination email and webhook URL after DNS settles. Submit a test entry after cutover. If the test entry lands but customer submissions do not, the issue is usually a CAPTCHA misconfiguration.

A retainer client has gone quiet for two months and you have nothing to send in the month-end summary.

That is a churn signal. Send a proactive note: "I have not seen new content from you in 60 days — is the site still doing what you need it to?" The conversation either restarts the engagement or surfaces the cancellation early enough to retain.

Reseller billing shows a charge you cannot explain.

Open the partner-tier invoice line items. Most "unexpected" charges trace to a plan upgrade on one client site or an over-quota event (storage, bandwidth). The invoice line names the client and the trigger.

Cross-link to deeper docs

• For Developer — the technical surface most agency work touches.
• For Content Editor — the role you hand off to clients at launch.
• For Platform Admin — the role for multi-site clients.
• SGEN Glossary — confirm platform language before writing client-facing docs.
• FAQ — what clients will read before they call you.

Other roles in the SGEN ecosystem

Each role on a SGEN site has its own onboarding guide. As the agency delivering the site, you should know the surface your client will live in after handoff.

Related reading

• Content Editor onboarding
• Developer onboarding
• Platform Admin onboarding
• Marketing Manager onboarding
• Ecommerce Manager onboarding
• SEO Specialist onboarding
• Support Agent onboarding
• SGEN Glossary
• FAQ