In this episode, I'm gonna be talking about how to build a
sustainable web design business.
So if you are a website designer, you're a website developer, it doesn't
matter whereabouts in your career that you are, this episode is here for you.
Hello and welcome to websites Made Simple, the podcast to support website
designers and developers in having the very best web design business they can
and earning a good amount of money while they do it as well, because, I dunno
about you, but I know a huge amount of website designers and developers who
come into my network, who come into my mentoring programmes, who all start off
under charging because they think that they need to build up a portfolio before
they can get going with their business.
And they believe that the only way to build that portfolio
is to do it on a makes rate or a skills squat or any anyway.
That means that they're not actually being paid for the skills that
they're bringing into the table here.
And I have a very strong work ethic around we do not work for free.
We do not work for too little money as well.
And we build the business that works for us and for our clients.
So if you're ready to spend a bit of time with me today to find out how to
do that and how to apply it for your business, then let's get started.
So the very first thing I want to suggest is that you collaborate with
others in your web design business.
And we know there is the stereotypical website designer that they're hunched
over their keyboard, they're there in a hoodie and jeans, they might have
their earbuds in, they might not.
And ultimately they are working there in isolation.
And if we want to stretch that stereotype a little bit further, they'll also be
talking in tech jargon and they generally will avoid any in-person meetings
and most likely phone calls as well.
And that is so far removed from what website designers and developers
are showing up as today showing.
I mean, granted, there are still some people who would prefer their own
company and who wear hoodies in the industry and that is absolutely on them.
But I can assure you the more you collaborate, the more money you'll
make, the less stressed you'll feel about projects and the happier
you will be in your business.
And when I say about collaborating, it can be with other website designers 'cause
that can always be really helpful when you have too much work and you might wanna
come bring someone in as a white labeler or whether you've been asked to work on
a project that's slightly outside of your skillset and you just want the reassurance
of someone else who you work with as well.
It could be copywriters, it could be SEO specialists.
I can tell you if you go on LinkedIn connect with some SEO
specialists, you are gonna learn so much more about the industry.
So it's absolutely worth doing.
Could also be branding designers and um.
Copywriters as well.
But these are the key people who are going to help you to build a
really, really good business because we know that website projects don't
begin and end with the website build.
I mean, essentially they begin with the copy and the brand.
And we want to be able to support our clients in getting over the hurdle
of booking the website and getting started with the website because we
only get paid when the work happens.
But often people will really still, at the copywriting stage, they will
think, I can write this myself.
I know about my own industry, that's why I work in the industry.
But writing about your industry in a way that pulls people in through
the website and working in your industry are two different things.
Now, as a web designer, a developer and a copywriter, if you're listening, you are
gonna know that, but your client isn't.
And so if they come to you as the website designer or developer as their first port
of call, you really want to be able to say to them, let's talk about copywriting.
Because the copy is going to be what influences the user experience, what
helps people with, uh, you know, clicking on and buying products
or services through the website.
It's also gonna influence the SEO as well.
So having someone in your network, or a few people in your network
who you can recommend, who you know that you work well with, is always
going to be a really good thing.
And that goes for working with SEO specialists and
branding designers as well.
And I personally really grew my business when I started working
with a branding designer.
We had gotten on very well and I had used her for my own branding.
Then I started sending clients her way.
And I just knew that my clients were always gonna have a really
good experience of working with her.
And the same with the copywriters who I've recommended.
I always know that my clients are safe with these people and that
we're gonna have good work and it's gonna be delivered on time.
And that really helped to cement my reputation, not only as a great
website designer, but someone who was well connected and who could put all
of the parts of the website together for my clients, and essentially
project manager it all as well.
And it also meant because I was recommending these people for my
clients, it also meant that they were recommending me to their clients.
So my business grew a lot once I started collaborating.
And I have my Sparks Group mentoring programme, which is a weekly hot seat
group mentoring session, and it's full of website designers and developers and
SEO specialists and copywriters, and SEO copywriters, and everybody works together.
They collaborate, they recommend each other.
We have a group chat where people themselves, can someone
write me some CSS for this?
Or can someone do that?
And it's a real joy to see, and I promise you it's not a requirement
of sparks that everyone collaborates.
It's just that's the vibe in the group.
I always say we're about collaboration, not competition.
And if you view your web design business as that, that you are a collaborator,
not a competitor, it's gonna massively open up the market for who you work with.
It's gonna open up your mindset and it's gonna do really good
things for your business.
So that is an absolute essential one out there is collaborate with others.
I completely recommend it.
So the next thing I'd like to say is work out what it's you are offering
and review whether it's working for you and do this regularly, because
the more experienced you get and with every new website build, you do every
new client you bring on, you're getting a little bit more experience as well.
And when we start out with websites, we tend to just build anything.
We think, oh, thank God someone's gonna be paying our bills this month.
Yes, I'll do it.
But that's not always gonna be right for you.
And I would say, you know, niche as much as you can into, maybe you want
to do high volume amount of budget websites, or maybe you want to go into
kind of more expensive bespoke sites.
Maybe you want to just have your business as doing website maintenance
and care plans and advisory.
Or some people run their business doing just kind of power hours and fix it hours.
Or there's website hosting maintenance contracts that people
sign up to that has a certain amount of kind of that blog uploads and
things like that in them as well.
How you run your business will be unique to you.
But what's really important is you make sure that it keeps working for you.
Because if you become unhappy with a service that you are providing or a
product you've got, that unhappiness is going to kind of leach out
into the communication with your clients and your clients will lose a
little bit of trust in you as well.
So it's important that you always feel really aligned with what you
are working on and that will change.
The more experience you get, the more it will change.
And that's okay.
Just stick with what works for you as well.
So one of the things that I think is a little bit niche, but I have worked with
website designers who are sole traders, who are limited companies who are cics.
I've worked with people at all different stages and the one thing
that I have always found very helpful and I practised it myself, and it
is something we can cover sometimes as part of my mentoring programme.
Something that we can look on at when I do as part of my mentoring
programme, is actually registering your business as a limited company.
And one of the reasons that I recommend that you do this separately to being
a sole trader is keeping the company finances separate from your own
finances can be really, really useful.
And there are also some different reasons that I would recommend that
you speak to your accountant about your tax relief and stuff like that.
But one of the reasons I say having your company money separately is because
it doesn't matter how experienced you are, it's you will have feast and
famine months within the industry.
You know, everyone sat there in that January thinking, holy
smokes, how am I gonna keep going?
Or I need to book some website builds right now.
And yeah, other pe other times we'll be there in like the September and thinking,
oh my gosh, I've got too much going on.
Everything needs to be done by Christmas.
I need to get some white labelers involved as well.
And having that in a separate bank account with separate cashflow managed
by an accountant can be absolutely worth its weight in gold because, and
I promise you this ties in, and I did a podcast episode not too long ago
about why it's really important to outsource in your web design business.
And this came directly from one of my mentoring sessions in the
Sparks Group, where we realised that some of the people who were in
the group were bottlenecking money.
They were getting the money in for for a website build.
And they would see that money as salary, not as income for the business.
So let's just take a figure of 3000 pounds, I dunno how much the website build
was, but let's say it was 3000 pounds.
It comes into the company and immediately they think, oh, thank
goodness that's two months salary paid, or one month salary paid, or
whatever it is that they're earning.
But that's not actually the case because that money comes into the business and
then we need to look at using a portion of it to pay the software that we are
using to build the website with and for paying the hosting and then all the other
bits and pieces that make up the company.
And one of the things that website designers and developers can tend
to do is they overwork on areas that they could outsource to
someone like a va, for example.
If you have to make changes to a lot of images, and that could be that you've
gotta put coloured gradients on them or you've gotta put text over them or they'll
need resizing, that is not worth your time as a website designer or a developer
at, let's say you are doing your time at 75 pounds an hour when you could have a
VA working on that at 38 pounds an hour.
And you could be using your time to finish off the website builds to do some of your
marketing set up as a limited company.
To run your accounts, whatever it is that you could be doing in that time.
You don't want to be doing it faffing around with images or
something that a VA could do.
Or when I get busy and I absolutely do practise what I preach.
I'm just starting another two custom website built side by side at the moment
and I have paid a white labeler to copy dump all of the website content in
there so that I can just go in there.
It's gonna save me hours, hours of time because it's already in there
as titles and textbook and I can just go in and start designing and
building and I don't have to read everything and put it all down there.
I know where I'm at with this as well.
And the next job for that freelancer is to, uh, do the
images for the site as well.
So trust me, outsourcing is a really big part of having a website design business.
One that you didn't, you are not going to burn out in because you are not
doing all the things you don't think, oh, I've spent the whole day designing.
Oh gosh, I haven't done all the invoices for today.
I haven't done my marketing, I haven't replied to anyone on LinkedIn.
I haven't replied to the email of that person who was
inquiring about working with me.
This gives you the opportunity to do that.
And it might be a case of you absolutely love doing your images, but
you don't like replying to clients.
Again, just mix it up, get a really good VA who can manage your
email address or whatever else.
But one of the things is we think as website designers and going back
to that stereotype of, you know, we all sit there working alone, that
we've actually gotta be alone in our businesses and we absolutely don't.
And, you know, collaboration is so important.
Outsourcing helps us kind of contribute to within the economy and
pay other people's salaries as well.
Without that fear of, oh my gosh, I'm paying their mortgage.
So it's a really good thing as well to do.
So do really consider, have a thing and think, where could I outsource?
And even if it doesn't feel like the money or the payback from it is coming
to me immediately when I've actually won more business through having time to
do my marketing or whatever it is that works for you, you will realise that
actually outsourcing is paying for itself.
So it's really important.
So another thing that I wanted to talk to you about is about spending
time working on your business.
Because we can have this habit, especially as creatives.
Like I love the creative brain.
I mean, I drive people around me crazy, but the creative brain just
goes, oh, what's my next project?
What's the next one?
And the next one and the next one.
And that's great until you realise that there's you, you are coming to
the ends of a loaded website, builds.
It might be when it's starting to go into a quiet time and you
actually don't have a strategy.
You dunno where you know where you're going forward with it
or what you should be doing.
You know, you've just been on that hamster wheel of getting work and doing the work.
And as much as I have the creative brain, I'm also really good at strategy as well.
And I also go on planning days where I pay to go on days where I'm guided
through how to work on my business, how to plan for the next 90 days, how to
plan for the next six months, how to plan for the next year, and how to have
the overarching overview of everything.
And okay, I did do one last year, which was brilliant, but it was
projecting the next five years.
I thought I just can't plan that far ahead.
I dunno what tools I'm gonna have, I dunno what's you know, gonna be available.
So for me, kind of the next year or two years, having a detailed plan of the
next year and an overarching plan of next two to three years is what works for me.
But it's really important that you spend time looking at all the
areas of your business as well and creating actionable goals around them.
So for example, where I was saying about work out what it is you are offering
and review, whether it's really working for you, spending some time actually
working on the business allows you.
Oh my goodness, I do not want to be doing this area of my work in
two years time and it's just too stressful or I don't like it.
Or it could be that one time I was working on my business and I decided
that I wanted to have enough hosting and maintenance monthly contracts come
in, that it would pay for my salary and the business expenses and that would be
like my bare minimum if that would just come from that one stream of income.
And then anything else over that, you know, goes into profit, it
goes into more planning days.
So I can do better things with it and yeah, I can set up more
services and things like that.
So these, having these times where you step away from your business so
that you can work on your business is really, really important because you are
then going to set actionable goals and hopefully you will also award yourself
an accountability partner to make sure that you are achieving those as well.
And that part of it is really important.
And what I tend to do is I tend to use my long suffering best friends
as my accountability partners.
They are both really professional people.
And so if I say to them, can you check in with me about this on this date and
time, can you do this and that then they will do it and I'll know that it's coming
up 'cause we've all got in the calendar.
What I try not to do as much is use my freelancer fellow creative friends to
do this with as well because they're off doing their own thing and they might
think, oh, I don't really wanna jog her, or they might forget or whatever else.
So just sometimes stepping outta the bubble of the people who I'm
working with on a daily basis can really help with that as well.
And if you are in interested in having planning day, spending some time working
on your business, meeting some people who you can collaborate with as well.
I'm gonna be running some planning days towards the autumn, um, winter of this
year so that we can get nice and set up so we can handle that pre-Christmas
rush and we can also spread things out ready for that quiet time in January
and as things start to pick up again.
So if that's something you would be interested in, email me at hello at
websites made simple co uk I will reply to your email only I manage that
email address so you do get me and I'll be able to give you more plans
and information as and when it becomes available as well, which is code for
once I found the right venue for us.
But it's gonna be good and it's gonna be very transformative
for your career as well.
So I've just got a couple more that I want to run through with you as well.
And one is about the money gap in website design.
So I've talked about setting up as a limited company so that you can really
handle your finances separately to to the rest of your money as well.
I've talked about doing what really works for you and where you really
feel lit up by your work as well.
And I finally want to talk about money, rather look at what you would like
to earn, what you are charging for, what you're currently offering and
whether you can get there doing that.
Because a lot of time people think, oh, I would love to spend, let's just
say for example, 60,000 a year, but they're actually only charging 1500
pounds for a website and then it's taken them a month to build that website.
And they might have two websites on the go.
And so they might even be getting 3000 pounds a month, but that
isn't going to get them anywhere near, they're still 2000 pounds a
month short of their 60,000 a year.
And it's then looking at where are the money gaps and how do we fill those gaps.
And I promise you I will do another episode on how we earn money as
website designers because we tend not to do it all from one place.
So for example, I earn money through my website builds, I earn money through my
website clinic, which are power hours where people can come and work through
some problems with me in that time.
I also run workshops and master classes.
Those come in as kind of one-off payments.
I have my mentoring programmes that gives monthly payments and I have my website
hosting maintenance services as well.
And then you put all of that in the pot and it's what makes it work as well.
But it's really important that you list out the different services that you offer,
how much you're charging for them and what you need to do to be able to, one, reach
the go, the financial goal you have, but two, to be able to reach that financial
goal and include the, the expenses you have along the way of things like
hostings and theme licences and plugins and all that sort of thing as well.
And finally, I would recommend that you look at getting a mentor.
Now, obviously I do mentor website designers and developers, and I work
with people at all levels, whether that's really newly setting up and in the first
couple of years or whether like me, you've been in business for 10 plus years and
you are looking to tighten things up.
You wanna get to the next level, you wanna review your services.
You can come and work with me on all of those levels.
And you can go to the website's made simple website, uk and you can see
the offer offerings that I have there.
I also have one-to-one mentoring calls, just one-off sessions.
And that could be that you've maybe given the final draught of a website to a client
and they haven't looked and liked it.
And we can talk through what you could do to improve that website
or how to handle the client.
We also I work on crisis calls with people when it's all looking like
it's gonna fall out bed with a client.
You want to make sure you get paid, you want to be able to handle the next steps.
You can get in touch with me through those one-off sessions as well.
But whether you choose to work with me or whether you choose to work with
someone else, having a mentor is the single most thing that will increase
your opportunities in your website design and development business as well.
Learning from someone who has been there, who's seen the mistakes, who can help show
you the opportunities that are available to you and just help you structure things,
whether that's with the creative side of the business or whether that's looking
at your processes behind the scenes, it is something that will absolutely
pay for itself over and over again.
You'll see with my mentoring programmes, which are six month programmes, that
they are priced at the price point of relatively lower price point custom
build websites because I know that if we work together one-to-one and in
group settings over six months, you will secure a custom build website,
which will pay for that programme.
You'll secure much more than that, but that's how I priced it for you as well.
And again, I put my money where my mouth is.
I often have coaching, mentoring, I've just come off the back of a planning
day, which is a coaching day as well.
And every time it's really influenced my business and I want
to help you to influence yours in all the most positive of ways.
So that's us for this week.
I hope it's given you a lot to think about.
Do get in touch with me.
I'd love to hear from you.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode.
You can reach me at hello at websites made simple co uk.
You can also find me on LinkedIn as Holly c Christie.
Come and drop me a dm. I would love to hear from you and I will
see you again on the podcast soon.