Building a Web Design Business Again - 9 Years Experience - 2nd Attempt at a Business - Progress/Accountability Thread

[taylerhughes]

Hi all,

Long time lerker, first time poster.

Starting this thread to keep me accountable and pushing forward when I go through dips in motivation or just get bored of the grind.

I plan on building this up again alongside my day job as I've just had a baby boy and I'm not in a position to lose my income.

I'm currently a Senior UI/UX Designer in one of the UK's largest gaming companies which pays well but I don't want to be working to put profit in someone else's pocket for the rest of my life.

I started out in the industry as a front end developer over 9 years ago, I transitioned to design quickly after that and and moved into product design (UX) around 3 years ago. I know my designs can provide even the largest organisations value, my problem has always been sales. I've previously run a web design business, fairly successfully I was averaging just less than 1 website a month for between £2k - £4k. My hatred of sales led to a lack of motivation which led to me taking a full time position.

I. Hate. Sales.

I feel like I can and will force myself to do sales but I have never enjoyed it and never will. Last year I signed up for the @Fox Web School which had a lot of really useful information, which helped me understand that I can do it...I just don't want to. The sooner I can outsource the bulk of the sales work, I will. I know my strengths and weaknesses, sales is 100% a weakness, I'm better off focusing on my strengths.

Current Plan:

• Use my knowledge and experience of user experience to distinguish myself. Good UX means the different between a successful website and failed one.
• The core of my business will be to provide value. Always integrating upfront discovery and strategy to understand the business, the customers and the problems that can be solved by the website.
• Focusing more on inbound marketing. Providing value on social media, helping businesses for free to build up a following. I'm hoping that this will reduce my problem with sales, leads coming to me should be less of a grind than cold calling etc. Possibly using YouTube but not sure.
• Build the business around me as a person rather than a faceless company. Establish myself as a expert in the industry (no idea how, TBD)
• Build on ReactJS (possibly develop my own CMS in the future with built in support and upselling for things like email etc) then push to a static site generator for the best speeds possible. I'm reviewing Webflow at the moment for smaller sites. Not using Wordpress.
• Potentially LinkedIn advertising, although this is a new platform for me I've done PPC before so this shouldn't be a huge learning curve.

Current Goals:
Finish branding
Finish designing website
Have 200 followers on social media

I've not been a heavy user of social media in the past because I don't like all the cheesy half arsed content churning fake news shitty content that companies produce but I hope by thinking of it as a platform to reach people that I can help and letting it grown organically from that, it can be quite useful and I can produce worthwhile content.

I'll update with progress and thanks for all the useful information I've gained while lerking on the forum over the past couple of years.

Tayler

 

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[Phikey]

Welcome!! Why do you hate sales?

 

[taylerhughes]

Welcome!! Why do you hate sales?

I'm an introvert so the concept of putting yourself in front of people and pitching yourself isn't appealing but it's more that I'm going to companies with a fair price for work that is going to benefit their business, I just want to know if they're in the market or not, I don't enjoy the faffing around going back and forth, jumping through hoops to get a sale only to find out 2 months later that their friend of a friend thinks they can build websites so he's going to give it a try for free.

I understand that this is a HUGE generalisation and it's only based on my personal previous experience.

I'm hoping that by establishing myself more as an expert in the industry and focusing on inbound marketing the sales process will become more of what I can do to help these companies.

I also think I can solve this by targeting bigger companies.

 

[Pero123]

I'm an introvert so the concept of putting yourself in front of people and pitching yourself isn't appealing but it's more that I'm going to companies with a fair price for work that is going to benefit their business, I just want to know if they're in the market or not, I don't enjoy the faffing around going back and forth, jumping through hoops to get a sale only to find out 2 months later that their friend of a friend thinks they can build websites so he's going to give it a try for free.

I understand that this is a HUGE generalisation and it's only based on my personal previous experience.

I'm hoping that by establishing myself more as an expert in the industry and focusing on inbound marketing the sales process will become more of what I can do to help these companies.

I also think I can solve this by targeting bigger companies.

Any progress on this? Are you still building a web design business or?

 

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