#SuccessMindset #BusinessGrowth #DigitalMarketing
No, it’s not a sex ed question.
Here’s the deal — I’m cruising, making $200K a year from web design. But the business is a real bitch. It’s so hard to get clients. I also work from Mexico, all my clients are from the US / Canada. I can’t network in person or any of that crap. So it’s all cold calling, and cold emailing.
And I feel that no matter what I do, I can’t see a path to making $20M/year doing this. It’s doomed. And I don’t even get why… theoretically there is enough business in the market but it’s so hard to differentiate and acquire it.
So what do I need to level up? To go from the $200K/year to $2M/yr and then $20M/yr?
Do I need to switch to a different business? Do I need a different way to acquire clients? I feel so confused…
## Discovering the Problem
It sounds like you’re facing a common dilemma in the business world – how to scale your business and reach those big financial goals. The first step is to identify what’s holding you back from reaching that $20M/year mark.
### Lack of Differentiation
One issue you may be facing is a lack of differentiation in your web design services. With so many competitors in the market, it’s crucial to find ways to stand out and offer something unique to potential clients.
### Limited Reach
Working from Mexico while targeting clients in the US and Canada can certainly present challenges in terms of networking and building relationships. Finding ways to expand your reach and connect with potential clients in meaningful ways is essential for growth.
## Practical Solutions
Now that we’ve identified the challenges you’re facing, let’s explore some practical solutions to help you make it real big in the web design industry.
### 1. Specialize in a Niche
Consider specializing in a specific niche within web design, such as e-commerce websites for small businesses or custom WordPress themes for influencers. By focusing on a niche, you can differentiate yourself from competitors and attract clients seeking specialized services.
### 2. Build Relationships Online
Instead of relying solely on cold calling and emailing, explore digital marketing strategies to build relationships with potential clients online. Utilize social media platforms, content marketing, and email newsletters to showcase your expertise and connect with your target audience.
### 3. Offer Value-Added Services
Consider expanding your services beyond traditional web design to offer value-added services such as SEO optimization, content creation, or ongoing maintenance packages. By providing comprehensive solutions to your clients’ needs, you can increase the value you offer and attract higher-paying clients.
### 4. Collaborate with Professionals
Networking doesn’t have to be limited to in-person events. Collaborate with professionals in complementary industries, such as graphic designers, copywriters, and marketing specialists, to expand your network and offer integrated solutions to clients.
### 5. Invest in Personal Development
Lastly, don’t underestimate the power of personal development in your journey to success. Invest in skills development, attend workshops and conferences, and seek mentorship from industry leaders to continuously improve your craft and stay ahead of the competition.
With these practical solutions in mind, you can overcome the challenges you’re facing and make it real big in the web design industry. Embrace the opportunity for growth, stay motivated, and keep pushing yourself to reach those $20M/year goals. You’ve got this! 💪🚀
Remember, success is a journey, not a destination. Keep striving for greatness and you’ll see the results you desire. Good luck on your path to making it real big in the world of web design! 👩💻🌟
Do you have to do all the work yourself? Maybe get some other developers on board or people who specialize in getting/securing leads? To get to 20M/Yr you need to scale, somehow. If you want to get to that figure on your own you may need to start selling your services as a super high-ticket one at the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands per project.
What about add web development services instead of just designing?
Comment rewrote with chatGPT : Have you considered selling pre-designed solutions that require minimal customization? This involves creating a standard base for your projects and customizing it with pre-designed modules, streamlining website development and allowing you to concentrate on unique client-specific modules. This approach could enhance profitability and efficiency over a year. Implementing this strategy could also simplify the sales process, as you could employ sales personnel to generate leads and present a catalog to clients, reducing the time spent on gathering and understanding client specifications. What are your thoughts?
Have a chat with mannie fresh
Big companies don’t do much different from their smaller competitors. They just do it more.
You need to develop a very detailed sales strategy that have well defined customer segments and personas. Once that is documented you need to work with an outbound sales rep who is good at crushing new biz and pay them high ticket commissions on new business ops won. You will not be able to scale until you create processes and have others do it for you.
Try out Government contracting
From what i can see, is that you lack these things.
-brand
-organic reach
-quality cold emails and calls.
Depending on your price point, it’s inevitable that you will hit the ceiling and until and unless you increase your price / bring organic leads you can’t grow.
I will give you an example.
I run a copywriting agency with a 4 digit MRR. I started it a few months ago, but after seeing people building design agencies on social media, i found something out.. Organic reach >>> cold call,email… And so for the past month i am on the path to build a brand around my agency, and i am gaining a quite a few number of followers every week on Twitter. Which in turn has helped me increase the revenue /get more client calls without even needing me to cold email anyone.
2M/year is a veryy big number, be realistic… Go for $500k first and then 1M
Curious why none of your clients are in Mexico if you are in Mexico.
I see your issue with the high cost for led gen on the scalable platforms.
What is your average customer’s ticket? Whats the margin on that? Do you have recurring revenue or repeat business from those customers or are they one and done projects mostly?
I assume if you’ve been doing this for awhile, you also have a strong email list?
If you want to scale it all comes down to sales. Gotta get that revenue, you either take the chance and hire some more manpower to close more deals or you will end up being stagnant. I’d look into a company who can find you customers, or hire in-house members to do it.
Focus your direct sales efforts on larger clients, cast a wider net for smaller clients, and don’t spend much time on deadend leads. A wider net can be cast through collaborating with services companies such as consultants, lawyers, and accountants who have clients that may be keen on your solutions.
I went from making a few thousand dollars per client to a few hundred thousand dollars per client this way for my consulting business, it’s a minimal overhead way to scale. The alternative would be to hire a sales team/outsource for lead generation work.
This is where you’ll need a sales motion. I helped a web design / dev shop out of India build a lite GtM stack, define customer profiles, and put together a sales process. Happy to connect if you’re interested.
Why the hell do you need 20M a year? You’re making 200k a year in mexico. That’s beyond amazing. DO it for a few years and retire. Wtf.
If you have some liquidity to try it out, you could try to pick up a sales rep in a high dollar market you want to target, and have him network his ass off in local business groups. It’s definitely a who you know kind of business.
If you’re able to be consistent with your sales doing what you are already doing, then you could also try to simply turn up that volume by using dialing tools, or outsourced reps to just 10x the volume.
Scale your business by building a SaaS product.
How do you generate volume?
You build a self-liquidating funnel feeds into your agency.
For example, let’s say most of your clients are dentists….
You could run ads for web development to dentists but results would be meh… might get some bites, but lead cost will be high. Dentist’s don’t really want web dev.
Or… you could build an offer dentists really want. Something like “How to Optimize Dental Practices for Maximum Value, all while working less”. You sell them books and education on how to do this. And part of the solution is to make sure their websites are on point. So now you have lead flow into your web dev agency. If done right, and with optimization, the frontend offer will liquidate the cost of advertising, so now you can scale up without huge expenses.
Self liquidation is how you generate a lot of volume.
Honestly, if you can somehow productize the offer and sell it on retainer, you can start pitching it way easier, building systems, and growing sustainably.
Maybe you’ve heard of Brett from DesignJoy (there are mixed opinions about him). Regardless, his design agency biz model works and he’d make way more if he just incorporated a team of freelancers into his system.
First of all, don’t worry about not being in the US, no one is networking here in-person. That’s a myth and it only works when you already have a large existing network. So it’s fine.
Who are your clients right now? Individuals or businesses?
One way to grow is through large long-term contracts. Look at your business as a service provider business, check out growth models of consulting and staffing companies. A set of large clients, set of mid-size clients and small clients.
To grow 10fold in revenue you’ll need to grow in assets. Your assets can be people or they can be digital assets. Something repeatable reusable that can be sold over and over again without extra labor.
finally get to use this corporate buzz word…..synergy…..you should look at ways to increase your monetization of current clients and find ways to generate reoccurring revenue. Products that have a synergy with what you are already doing.
Are you working alone? If so, you might need to delegate some basic tasks.
“If you want go somewhere fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
20M? As in million? Even if you’re in US of A. That is a heck of a grind and years of dedication. Cmon remember, you got competition too. Slow and steady wins the race. Baby steps brother.
Do you use social media to promote your business? YouTube? There is a reason why people are making so many tutorials online. As a social proof for others. If i look for web designer i will look for social media, to see what, how and with whom he is working.
Take testimonials from the people you worked with. And invest a bit of money into promoting that video with Facebook ads.
Make a simple website so people can schedule a call with you. Post what you’ve done so far, post bunch of testimonials there. About me page. Links to all of your social media and your tutorials.
Make tutorials and videos teaching people how to do something. And i know you will say you don’t have time. But you can find someone to do simple tasks insted of you so you can focus on this.
You need to be everywhere today if you want to succeed.
read e-myth.
The difficulty is that you have a service based business, whereas a tech SAAS based business can scale a lot faster without the headaches and difficulties of scaling a service based business – i.e – usually to 2x a service based business, you need to 2x your clients, 2x your staff, which often comes with 2x the problems and challenges. This is all totally possible but a service based business is harder to scale than most other tech businesses.
So, what you could do, is ‘sassify’ some of your business, and offer websites on a monthly fee instead of just a once off cost. You can keep your existing business and clients but you can generate recurring income if you sassify part of your business. If you have monthly recurring income, you can take bigger risks as you know you will have $X coming in every month… and you can reallocate additional funds to new hires or sales.
Take a look at XYZ (www.site.xyz) or other similar products that offer a clone of their infrastructure in which you can launch under your brand. This will enable you to generate websites much faster, and with lower overheads, while generating monthly recurring revenue.
Please report back in time with an update on whatever strategies you tried, and the very best of luck.
Hire people?
Perhaps add marketing to web design. If you can’t meet “in person” say “I’ll buy you a $10 Starbucks card and we can have a coffee meeting over zoom.”
My assumption is web design is low churn. You get less value of the lifetime of your customers.
But with marketing if you’re good they’re always coming back. So each client you gain/retain has way more value.
Digital marketing agency. You need them, they’ll scale it for you ✨
Be careful with this and the advice you get.
It’s a service business. The only way to make more is more hours. That can be you, where your time is limited. Or that can be hiring people. With hiring people, don’t make the mistake thinking it will get you where you want to be. It’s a ton of work. The work you personally do will change drastically. You will be spending all your time on the business, and those people. Do you want that? Most find they don’t.
I would instead focus on figuring out how to outsource the actual work. On a small scale. Giving you the time to figure out what your $20m idea is.
Maybe you can approach some of these clients asking to become equity partners if they are startups? Maybe it’s learning a new skill. Maybe it’s launching your own idea.
I assume you need help with lead gen, if that’s the case there are platforms like instantly.ai and rocket reach which will automate your outreach mails and find leads for you and you can customise it to include follow up mails if the client responds and these subscriptions should be cheaper than your Google / FB ads. Also the amount of outreach you can do is crazy, I’m talking like close to 500 mails a day and it does have linkedin integration it finds profiles and sends your message.
Have you considered a high ticket subscription business model?
You need employees that work for less than their billing rate, then you need to market them and get steady contracts. A single person simply couldn’t put in enough labor to make that kind of money.
I can’t understand. You already make 200k. Isn’t this enough ? I can’t even make 2k per year because I can’t find customers in the exact same field (but in another market)
Unless you can do 100x the work in the same amount of time, you simply can’t do $20M/yr. Web design does not scale for an individual.
mf in here talkin about $20M. C’mon man. Talk about $400k first.
You’re making $200k a year from a 4th world country and you’re complaining about how much you make? Level up advice: don’t move from Mexico or if you do move to an even cheaper country. Money problems solved. You make more than most Americans with 100x higher cost of living. Unless you’re trying to move to LA and marry a Kardashian. Then you’ll need $20 mil a year.
You’ll need to create a commodity based product in order to scale — there’s lots of ways to do that but it takes time, a mar tech stack and a business plan to get there — happy to chat further if you want to dm me
Service businesses are so hard to scale. The key is to productize your services with set packages and automated workflows to developers. Consider developing apps for shopify and other productized offering that you can create to upsell to clients. Products scale infinitely, services are limited by manpower.
Are you committed to making $20M in WEB DESIGN? Or you just want 20M?
Why not take your profit, invest in something that is more easily scaleable? Or even something like real estate?
One thing I think everyone is overlooking is your churn. If you could reduce your churn somehow (loyalty program, discounts, etc) you could increase your profit margin. This will be important the entire way to your lofty 20M/yr goal.
Design the best website for selling solar panels(just the panel itself not the installation). Find a solid supplier. Make anywhere from $10-100k a month selling them to solar companies and most important find a way to sell to the government as they buying tons of modules for large scale projects.
Reduce chrun, find a vertical, build something scalable
Take everything I say with a grain of salt, but my first guess would be to niche down and simply charge more per job. Then hire out lead generation and sales.
Dude you live in Mexico and make 200k/year. You can already live like a fucking king
Use SEO, the clients will come to you. All you need is some capable SEO agency. I am more than happy to help.
Who’s your customer?
What’s your sales strategy? Are you spraying and praying or do you have niche target markets?
You need referrals. Are there complementary businesses online you can network with who can refer clients to you? You can pay them a commission for each job.
Can your clients refer you to more clients? Pay them as affiliates as well.
If that takes off then you need to outsource more developers.
get people on board. hire people that can cold call and that can help web design. you’re not going to make $2M, or even $1M doing everything by yourself in web design. you’re doing good though🙌, just seems like you’ve reached your limit of what you can do by yourself. Can’t wait to see the growth!