How do you change from selling services to selling products? How do you go from serving clients to serving customers?
This freelance web design business has so many twists and turns. First you’re filled with fresh enthusiasm about quitting your job and landing your own clients. But as time goes by, satisfying all of your clients (often rediculous) requests becomes draining. You (I) start to reconsider your business model.
Working in a service industry such as custom web design doesn’t exactly fit into the “set it and forget it” business model advocated by Tim Ferriss in his (awesome) book, The 4-hour workweek (read my reactions to it here). Serving clients requires constant interaction and personal involvement every day.
As a freelance web designer, you’re not left with many options if you’re hoping to embark on a mini-retirement. But I’ve been kicking around some ideas that may help to relieve some of the of stress of being overworked and bogged down with mundane website maintenance requests.
I’ve only actually tried and tested some of these. I’d love to get feedback from those of you who found yourself in a similar situation.
Product-ize your services
Find your most common form of service you do for clients. For me, the most common jobs are web portfolios and E-Commerce websites. The idea is to formulate a “Web Portfolio Package” and an “E-Commerce Package”. When a potential client inquires about either of these, I simply point them to the web page detailing that package.
The E-Commerce Package would consist of a “base” project scope with a set price. That would include Magento design/development, payment gateway installation, and populating 10 products. Then they can opt for other popular add-ons with set price additions. These would include things like email marketing, WordPress blog, Logo Design, etc.
Standardizing the services offering can speed up the discovery / proposal phase. Your Packages pages might also work well as landing pages for targeted marketing campaigns.
Package your maintenance hours
Offer pre-paid bundles of hours at a slight discount from your normal hourly rate. This can help to plug up the holes in your maintenance billing. All of those 5 minute emails and quick tweaks from clients can easily go un-billed if they take less than 10 minutes to complete. But if they work against a pre-paid plan, then that work is accounted for.
Power to the CMS!
The answer to keeping clients off your back after their site is launched? Content Management Systems (CMS). WordPress is my CMS of choice.
But lets face it. Despite having the CMS, most clients still require lots of hand-holding. You have to provide thorough training, plus documentation for them to hold on to. Even better- video screencasts for how to manage their content.
I’d suggest preparing and perfecting these materials once and re-using them for all of your CMS clients.
Be selective
Coming back to my first point about productizing your most popular services, how about focusing on only those services? Taking on all of those smaller, more specialized and unique projects can often prove to be more time consuming than expected, taking away from your bread and butter projects.
Once you have a good thing going (your freelance web design business), stick to what’s working! Push your most popular services and market directly to those clients (or should we call them customers?).
Over to you…
How do you structure your business? Do you do it all or specialize in one thing? How do you shift your offering as time goes on? Please share…
The wheels are in motion on a new online business startup (ThemeJam) that I’m involved in. You can read the full details about ThemeJam here, but in this post I’d like to share some thoughts about the very first week of operations.
This is the pre-pre-launch to-do list. Action items that come before website development, before logo design, before the marketing push. These are the first steps to establishing the online presence for your business:
Domain
Obvious. A great domain is crucial. Something short, easy to spell, easy to remember, and no dashes. .com is ideal. Don’t settle for a .net or .org if there is already an established company on the .com.
Determining your company name and registering your domain should be your combined first step. Don’t settle on a name for your business unless that domain is available.
Twitter
This was my immediate 2nd step after grabbing the domain. Twitter names are now a hot commodity, so you must reserve yours ASAP. I’d even go so far as to suggest checking the Twitter name availability before finalizing your domain name.
Facebook
Your online business will need a Facebook presence, a.k.a. a Facebook fan page. Although you won’t be able to register your Facebook vanity URL (facebook.com/YourBusiness) right away because they require you to have 100+ fans, it’s still a good idea to get your fan page up sooner rather than later.
WordPress blog
Having a blog is a crucial tool for any effective web company. Don’t wait until your hard-launch to start it. Fire up your wordpress blog during week 1, even if you’re not driving traffic to it yet. During this pre-launch period, you can populate the site with searchable content, set the groundwork for keyword optimization, and develop a blogging style for your new company.
I also suggest signing up for Feedburner right from day 1 of your blog. That way all of your RSS subscribers are contained in a single optimized feed, rather than split between the default WordPress feed and Feedburner.
Analytics
You’ll want to start tracking your visitors right from the start. Make sure you set up a Google Analytics account and drop the code in the footer of your website/blog. Again, even if you’re not officially launched yet, you might receive hits from soft-launch promotions, keyword searches, etc. It’s always good to be in the know on these things.
Don’t wait until launch day to activate analytics! Remember it will take 24 hours for stats to begin recording.
Email
Another obvious step, but a very important one during your first week. Set up and test your company email account(s) as this will be your primary method of official communication. I’d also recommend setting up Google apps so that you can use Gmail for your domain email account(s).
Basecamp
This might not be for everyone. But you should establish some kind of hub for internal communication among your partners and/or employees. We’re utlizing the project management web-app, basecamp for our startup. It’s the perfect tool for collaborating on company planning, product development, to-do lists, etc.
I’ve been putting off reading Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek for a while now. At first, I had the impression that it was geared more towards nine-to-fivers, giving them the extra push they needed to quit their jobs and go freelance.
Since I’ve already been freelancing for almost two years, I felt this book didn’t apply to me.
Boy was I wrong!
It’s a fantastic read. For anyone, in any industry and any lifestyle. Yes, Ferriss encourages breaking out on your own and engaging in “lifestyle design”, but this is far from a “how to quit your job” book.
It’s about increasing your level of enjoyment in whatever you do – whether that’s freelancing, running your own business, or working for the man. This book is packed to the brim with tips and immediate actions you can take to implement the necessary changes to improve your lifestyle.
Here are a few takeway actions I have put to the test:
Limit checking email.
OK, I admit, I haven’t gone as far as Tim suggests (check it once a week). But considering I used to keep my two email accounts open on my desktop roughly 9 hours a day plus my iPhone access, I can definitely say I cut down my gmail frenzy significantly.
I no longer leave my email accounts open. I check email roughly twice a day (OK, occasionally a third time). I turned off the Google notifier and I put the iPhone out of sight when I’m relaxing at home.
The biggest tip here is to avoid checking email first thing in the morning. Set today’s list of tasks, and knock out the most important task first. Then do your first email check in the late morning. I shoot for 11:00am. Otherwise, you’ll get caught up in the “urgent” requests for your attention, leaving your priorities unattended to.
Value your time. All of it.
In a previous post, I wrote about how to deal with work overload. Being chronically “busy” is still something I’m dealing with, but since reading The 4-Hour Workweek, I have come to value my time more than ever.
Ferriss defines “the new rich” as those who are rich in terms of financial comfort but also rich in terms of time. You could make six figures a year, but if you devote all your time to working a job you hate, then you’re not rich. You have to find a balance of financial and personal freedom. I couldn’t agree more.
So the action I’ve taken on this front is I have hired an assistant to help out with some of my web design work. This has helped significantly as I’m now able to focus more on my larger projects and work more on the big picture stuff.
That’s really just a taste
There’s so much more to take away from this book. Travel tips, credit card mastery, online business tools, remote working, and more. I highly recommend it to literally anyone who’s interested in making changes in their life (who isn’t?) – both large and small.
Have you read it?
Share the actions you have implemented since reading The 4-Hour Workweek. It’s interesting to hear how many different directions people can take after reading this book.
Every web design client asks it. It usually goes something like this:
“I want to add a shopping cart to my website. How hard is that to do?”
or
“I’d like a rotating flash animation that changes based on local weather patterns. That’s not too hard is it?”
Does difficulty matter?
Of course not.
I’m still going to charge for it. It must be hard enough for you to hire someone to do it, otherwise you’d do it yourself!
Nothing in web design is hard to do. Everything in web design is hard to do. This question has no meaning to me.
I think many clients have the assumption that if a website is really easy to use, then it must be easy to build. It’s often quite the contrary. Delivering smooth funtionality that’s easy to use is usually a tremendous challenge.
Meeting challenges and working out solutions is what web designers do.
In a recent episode, they gave an interesting talk about their strategic approach to managing their social media channels for their business. It’s quite simple really, but a very powerful concept.
The goal
Don’t just drive traffic to your business. Drive quality traffic to your business. Folks who will respond with blog comments, RSS subscribes, re-tweets, and hopefully purchases. But this concept is nothing new.
The concept
First, attract users to your satellite websites & social media and engage them. Then give them a road map to reach your business. The visitors who are motivated enough to finally get there, are the type of quality customers you’re looking for.
A customer might find you on Twitter. They follow an interesting link, pointing them to your Facebook page. They contribute to the conversation. Continuing on, they follow a link from your Facebook page to your blog. They subscribe and comment on your articles. Eventually they land at your business’s doorstep, browsing the products that your selling.
At this point, they already feel like they know you. They can relate to you and your customers. They’re already involved in your niche community, making them that much more comfortable about buying from you. That’s the magic of social media.
Here’s the Online Marketing Road Map, presented by From The Couch:
They recently made the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine and offered to send a free copy of it to any customer who was interested. So I quickly requested my copy and received the magazine in the mail a few weeks later. Sweet!
I flipped to the page about Freshbooks, and find a hand-written post-it note from Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks, thanking me for my interest. Wow. With nearly a million customers (probably a large chunk of them requested the magazine), this guy took the time to hand-write this note to each one?! Insane. But insanely cool.
FreshBooks has done an A+ job of turning me into a FreshBooks fanboy. Their service (online invoicing & bookkeeping) totally kicks ass, but their awesome blog, welcomed email newsletter, and personal touch to customer satisfaction is what keeps me coming back for more.
This is why I recommend FreshBooks to anyone who is looking for a great invoicing / bookkeeping system for their small business. Referrals are the name of the game. And this is how you dominate.
