Why Joe Delfgauw Started Online Lead Exchange

Online Lead Exchange is Joe Delfgauw's lead-generation exchange. Like most of what he builds, it didn't come from a whiteboard. It came from actually running the business.

It started in the call centers

In 2017 Joe was running six physical call centers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rooms full of people meant nonstop hiring, turnover, and overhead, and he got tired of it. So he shut the buildings down and figured he was done with call centers for good.

I thought I'd never be in the call center business again. Ten years later, we own the software that runs it.

Didn't work out that way. His companies are still in the space, they just own the tools behind it now — dialer, texting, email, lead management. Getting out of the building really meant getting into the software.

Learning the value of a lead

Around the same time, Joe put one of his people on a single job: build a lead company. She spent months on research and it led them straight into the personal-loan space, where the number of people applying every day was staggering. That was the first time the team really understood what a lead is worth, and they're still in it heavily today.

What Online Lead Exchange is now

These days the business buys and sells leads, generates them, acquires customers, and runs the paid media to feed all of it, on the back of more than two dozen lead partnerships. It works alongside Joe's media-buying agency, Pink Slushy Media, and his local-SEO web shop, GoodRep Media.

It all ties back to where it started. Leaving the call centers was never about walking away from leads — it was about building the machine that makes them and gets them to the people who work them. That's what Online Lead Exchange is, and it's how Joe sees lead generation: a lead is only worth what you do with it, so own the whole thing yourself.

See how the leads get routed and worked at LeadBranch, or read more about who Joe Delfgauw is.

Visit the company at onlineleadexchange.com.