In today's episode, we are going to get real about what is holding you
back from having the website design career that you always dreamed about.
Because trust me, it's not a case of you need to learn new design skills, or you
just need to get over this, or you just need to get that project out the door.
Most likely, what is stopping you right now is you, and we are
gonna get to the bottom of it.
You ready?
Let's get started.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Websites Made
Simple with me, Holly Christie.
I am a website designer, website designer's mentor, host of this podcast,
and I am here to help you have an absolutely brilliant website career
without self-sabotaging along the way.
I will admit that this episode has been completely inspired by my mentees
through my Sparks group mentoring program and my Phoenix mentoring program.
And the reason that these two programs exist is because there are website
designers out there who really, really want to get to the next stage of their
career, and they're just hitting the same boundaries over and over again.
And that's usually a money boundary.
And it might be a case of you're turning over the same amount
of money year on year, and you think, "But I'm busier than ever.
I'm really putting my marketing in there.
I'm really, I'm showing up on LinkedIn.
I'm guesting on other people's podcasts.
I'm doing everything I can.
Why aren't I earning more money?" And there's a lot of reasons that
come into this, and I mean, the main one really is money mindset.
And it can be really difficult when leveling up because there's that
expression, if you want to have something you've never had, you need
to do something you've never done.
So often we think that means a skill set.
We think that it means we need to learn to, you know, code a bit better
or design a bit harder or slicken our processes. And yeah, that's all great
stuff, and if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that
I always work to best practices, and I absolutely implore you to do the same.
So yeah, do all of those things.
But one of the things that we often haven't done is allowed ourselves
to really, get to grips with what leveling up, what dreaming big
for our businesses really means.
It starts with us, and everything else comes back from here.
Now I know that you are just one person listening to or watching this podcast, so
if I say hands up if, you have done these behaviors or think that you may have done
these behaviors, I'm not gonna see it, so you don't have to put your hand up.
But do listen out and tell me if any of these sound like you
Dropping your prices while you are mid-call or mid-email, just
mid-discussion with the clients.
So it could be that you've quoted a figure that you would really like to
earn from this project, but you are a little bit uncomfortable because that
figure is a bit of a stretch for you because you've not earned that before
or you've not charged that many times.
It could be that you've just leveled up to charging £3,000 for a website
and you quote that to the client and you say, "Yep, but if you sign up
today, I will knock £500 off it. Let me know if you have done that before a
client has even had a chance to speak, before they have had the chance to
consider the amount or say anything.
Because I know I've done it.
I know that I've done it completely unprompted, where I've really liked
the client and I've wanted to work with them, or I felt uncomfortable about the
figure, and I know that a lot of people who I have mentored have done the same.
And the first thing I want to do is to encourage you to put
the price out there and pause.
Because when you create that space, you create the space for the client to
consider it, to remember this is the first time that they are hearing that figure.
And this isn't necessarily gonna be a big figure or, outside the
realm of what they were thinking of.
Just pause.
It gives them some space, and it stops that nervous energy with you.
Because within that pause, you get the opportunity to say to yourself, "I
would really like to earn that from this project, and my work is worth it." So
pause, and then wait for their reply.
Now, this could be that you're doing it over email, so you naturally
do have to wait for a reply.
Could be that you're doing it on a Zoom call, and their reply might be something
that's along the lines of, "Yeah, that's great, but It was a bit more
than I was expecting to pay." And you have the opportunity to pause again,
and rather than drop the price, say, "I appreciate that, and I appreciate
that you may need to think about it.
What I can say is that that price reflects the quality of work and the website that
you're going to get at the end of this.
But have a think about it.
Let me know.
I look forward to hearing from you soon." We don't want to
force people to work with us.
But having that pause actually just removes that nervous energy
because when you have that nervous energy, people pick up on it.
And when you pause, when you take a breath and remind yourself you've
earned your seat at the table.
Even getting a client onto a call, you know, not every website designer can do
that, or they don't do it comfortably.
So just pause and wait and charge what you're worth.
Don't undercut yourself, and certainly don't undercut yourself immediately.
And one of the things that people in any industry can really suffer with,
but I'm gonna say particularly in the web design industry because that's who
I work with, is when you're leveling up, you know, year on year, we want to be
making more money because, well, we do.
We want it to reflect our experience.
We want it to reflect our work.
We want to meet the inflation rates, all that sort of thing,
so we want to earn more money.
That there's a difference between earning a bit more money because we're increasing
the prices of our payment plans or we're doing more websites, so we're getting
more people that are on payment plan.
And if you don't have payment plans, for website hosting and maintenance, then
you're really missing a trick because it's great recurring revenue, and it keeps
your clients on your client list as well.
So when they need some, rework on their websites and stuff like
that, they naturally come to you.
And if that's something that you haven't explored yet, and that's
something you would like to explore with me, then just drop me a line at
hello@websitesmadesimple.co.uk or come and find me on LinkedIn at Holly C. Christie,
and we can schedule some time together, and I can walk through what would feel
like some good options for you to get that started. When we're looking to level up,
we're looking to level up and make quite a lot more money, so not just increasing
the prices of our payment plans.
It could be that we are doing big jumps with how much we're charging for websites.
It could be that we are hoping to produce more websites each year.
It could even be that we are starting to work with some white labelers so
that we can pull in some more work and, get more websites out there.
Often, what's really stopping us from this is us.
We've never earned that much money before, so essentially we think that
we don't know how to, and it's where so many people get stuck at a certain figure
within their business, and they just, it doesn't matter what they do, they don't
seem to be turning over any more money.
And it's because they've got that mindset block of they don't know how to do it.
They don't know what it would look like to have X amount of more money in the bank.
And the ways that we do this, it's never a conscious thing because obviously
we all want to hit six figures.
Some people want to hit seven or eight figures.
But we all want to have that really comfortable lifestyle, and
we all want to feel really well rewarded for our work as well.
And so the ways that this can show up is that we can really bottleneck within
our businesses when it comes to money.
You have quoted for a website.
Let's use that 3,000 pound figure again.
You've quoted 3,000 pounds for a website.
The client's agreed to pay 3,000 pounds for a website, and immediately in
your mind you think, "Right, I have earned 3,000 pounds." In theory, no.
It means that you now have £3,000 coming into your business.
This is assuming, you know, that the website makes it all the way through
and, you know, the client pays up willingly for it at the end and
everything runs beautifully on time.
And when that's done, there is £3,000 in the business.
But this is not a solely earning amount of money.
Yes, you should be taking a salary from your business, but your salary shouldn't
be dependent on every bit of money that goes in there because we can find with
web design, because you can run it on quite a scrappy setup, I mean, essentially
all you really need is a laptop, some hosting, and a license for a good theme.
Or, you know, if you're a really techy dev, you don't even need
to pay for a theme license there.
And off you go.
It's really easy to think that we don't need to distribute money
any other way within the business.
We pay our hosting fees, we pay our theme fees, you pay your insurance
fee, and you're kind of there.
But actually, in that same way that you need to spend money to make money,
and rather than spend money, I'm gonna say you need to invest money
to make money, this is the same.
So when you bring money into your business, when you earn it, what you
really need to think about is what is the best way to distribute this?
How is this going to serve the business so that I can go on to make more money?
I was discussing this in our group mentoring session yesterday with one
of the lovely mentees who was saying that one of her roles, and you'll know
this well as a web designer, is that a particular client wanted an image
overlay on every image, and it had to be a gradient, and the gradient had to
work and run in a certain direction.
And so this web designer was using Canva to do that.
And across the website there were, you know, maybe 30 or 40 images, and
she was saying, "Oh, it's just, you know, it's repetitive." It's, uh, not
a waste of time, but it's not a good use of a website designer's time.
So we explored about what it would look like to use a VA to do that,
and that the reality of how much that would cost for a VA to do that.
And I've got a brilliant VA. She is really good at design and stuff like that.
It would probably take her an hour to do those, to deliver that, and that
would cost me, I think, £38 for the hour. If I handed that over to her, that
gives me an extra hour to be running a mentoring session at 150 pounds an
hour, to be running a website clinic at 150 pounds an hour, to be working on a
website build, to be doing marketing, to be pulling in more business.
So it is not worth my time or saving 38 pounds to do those kind of work myself.
As website designers, because we have that skill set, we often
forget that we don't have to do it.
Just because we can do it, we don't have to do it.
And actually, if we outsource some of this stuff, we are actually supporting
another freelancer as well, someone else within their own business.
They're supporting us.
It's a good two-way arrangement, but it also frees up the time for us to
use it where it is more valuable.
A lot of the time, website designers will bottleneck in their business when it comes
to money, when it comes to work like this.
And trust me, I've been there.
I've done it myself.
One of my really good friends, Ally, she came over a couple of years ago,
and we were talking about work, and I was saying about, "Oh, yeah, I do all
of this during the day, and then at night, you know, once I put the kids to
bed, I'll get out the laptop, and then I'll start working again." And she says,
"How many nights a week do you do that?"
And I said, "Well, yeah, five, you know, every workday." She's like, "How many
hours are you doing that for?" I said, "Well, probably about three or something."
She said, "So you're essentially halving your hourly rate." And I said
to her, "No, no, you just don't get it.
You know, you don't have your own business.
You don't get that we have to work around the clock."
She's like, "No, I do get it.
I've watched you run your own business for, like, um, over a decade.
I do get it.
You're absolutely devaluing your time." And when I really stopped and
thought about it, I also thought that when I was working in the evenings,
I am not nearly as productive, particularly when it comes to design.
It will take me a lot longer to do something that actually, if I was
just properly rested, I'd be able to blast out the next day as well.
It might be a case of I was also doing jobs that weren't serving
me, like the stuff that a VA could do as well, and I had become my
own bottleneck within my business.
And it meant that I actually went on to work with some mentors as well, and
we streamlined parts of the business.
We just tweaked things.
We changed some pricing.
We got some VAs on board, and it absolutely revolutionized stuff as well.
And you know what?
The more that I spent out doing this, the more that I was like,
"Right, I'm gonna book five hours or 10 hours a week with a VA.
I'm gonna book this, that, and the other," the more money I actually
ended up turning over in my business, the more I earned from it.
But also, I was happier with it.
I went on to earn a lot more in my business than I had ever earned
with it before that, and I learned really to get out of my own way.
Yes, I can do everything in my business.
Should I be doing everything in my business?
No.
Do I want to be doing everything in my business?
No, not at all.
And it's really about that letting go to be happy within your business,
letting go to give some time back for yourself, and understanding that
just because you work for yourself, it doesn't mean that you have to work
every hour that there is to yourself.
I mean, the beauty is to really create a business that still runs without
you, that you can step away from, that you only get involved in the bits that
you want to, that you only design the websites for the people that you want
to as well. So if there's any message I can give you is get out of your own
way, stop bottlenecking your business, and have some faith and confidence in
yourself that you can do this, that you can earn a really good salary, and you
can be really happy in your business.
And if this is something that you would like to explore with
working together, then I would absolutely love to hear from you.
Drop me an email at hello@websitesmadesimple.co.uk.
Come find me on LinkedIn at Holly C. Christie.
And yeah, I'd love to help you have a better business.
So until next time, go and have a look, go and see where you're the
bottleneck and what you can do about it.