Moved to Scottsdale, Growing a Web Design Firm

[MattR82]

Damn... just curious, why 30 days after for final stage? Did he request that?

Sounds like some kind of small claims tribunal thing but at least you are covered.

Does he have access to it yet? Can always just take it down till paid.

 

[mauamolat]

Hey everyone,

It's been about one year since I joined the forum and thanks to the great advice of some members of the community, I've been able to completely change my life and move in a better direction.

To keep it simple, I was working at an investment bank in NYC and absolutely hated my life / how I was treated.

This week I just moved into my apartment in Scottsdale after making the cross country drive solo. A few months back I started my web design business with the help of Fox's course which has provided tremendous value and I've already closed a $1250 and a $4000 sale so far (a few other possible ones in the pipeline too).

When I was trying to find my way, I probably cold emailed 250+ businesses and cold called 150+ with lots of rejection, but it was a great learning experience.

I know a lot of members are from the Scottsdale/Phoenix area, and as I'm new to the area, it would be great to meet up if anyone is interested to grab a coffee/drink sometime.

Thanks!

Great. Thanks for sharing the thought, Man. So how's the business going? What exact Web Design business do you do? Code from scratch or just WordPress? Can you share how you manage your projects and team? This is what I'm struggling with nowadays. More projects, more headache and sleepless nights

 

[GuitarManDan]

Crazy how Amazon has made so much appear "easy" or "normal".

My business partner, who runs the coding/website side of our business, deals with this pretty regularly. His auto response is, "Yes, and eBay and Amazon hired dozens of coders and spent millions of dollars to have that. You're spending $15k."



It sucks man. But at least you have the right attitude.

Thanks my man, yeah this guy is a handful. I'm honestly surprised he hasn't written an angry email back yet / sent more threats but I bet it's coming first thing on Monday.

 

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[CoderSales]

Brutal to hear about this pain in the a$$ client. I've had to deal with them and can tell you from experience, your 'spidey sense' will be 100X stronger now with these kinds of business owners. Also, if it's possible, can you post or DM the contract that you have in place?

 

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[Heavyd814life]

Awesome stuff, @GuitarManDan. Quick question about SEO...how exactly do you market it to clients and how involved is the process? I build in Wordpress and have used RankMath to SEO optimize the two sites I've built for clients. It's only a 30-45 min process so I don't charge extra for it, but I'm wondering if there's more I could be doing.

 

[spreng]

Do you think there's enough business out there to hire web dev's or sales reps?

 

[GuitarManDan]

Amazing success - I am at the start of my journey and struggling to find any potential clients. Mainly tried cold email and social DMs. Guess I need to pick up the phone and keep plugging away.

Hey man - in the beginning it's really just about not raising flags that people see as spammy (impersonal cold emails, DMs in their inbox, etc) and to build as much trust as possible to make your outreach more time efficient (reach out to local businesses, industries where you've had experience in, personal connections you know, etc).

Best of luck!

 

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[GuitarManDan]

I hope you know how much you inspire others on the journey. I haven't kept on the reading, but I'm glad it sounds like you are on the mend.

Thanks man, appreciate the kind words here. Hope that you're doing well - once the pandemic is slowing down we'll have to get our AZ fastlane monthly meetups going again.

 

[BenNguyen]

Hey everyone,

It's been about one year since I joined the forum and thanks to the great advice of some members of the community, I've been able to completely change my life and move in a better direction.

To keep it simple, I was working at an investment bank in NYC and absolutely hated my life / how I was treated.

This week I just moved into my apartment in Scottsdale after making the cross country drive solo. A few months back I started my web design business with the help of Fox's course which has provided tremendous value and I've already closed a $1250 and a $4000 sale so far (a few other possible ones in the pipeline too).

When I was trying to find my way, I probably cold emailed 250+ businesses and cold called 150+ with lots of rejection, but it was a great learning experience.

I know a lot of members are from the Scottsdale/Phoenix area, and as I'm new to the area, it would be great to meet up if anyone is interested to grab a coffee/drink sometime.

Thanks!

Hey Guys, I'm Ben Living in Philadelphia for past 6 years, Always wanted to move to Los Angeles, however it is crazy up there during these times and I'm still not making that much money to afford rent there.
My friends lives in Mesa Arizona, 20 min from Phoenix,

how do you like this area ? are there lots of young people ? Also how many of you live in there? I would like to connect with some like minded people.

I've been working a slave jobs for past 7 years,been dabbling with online businesses for past 2 years, recently read Uscripted and reading Fastlane now, I wanna make a change in my life and just move west, Thinking about learning to code and start a web design frellancing.

 

[CoderSales]

Hey man, I've definitely noticed this too. This is what I've found what my side and my thought process - long-term contracts are definitely the best, but especially with the pandemic going on still going crazy in the US a lot of business decision makers are hesitant to sign up for longer SEO contracts. It's a bit riskier on my side, but I'm confident in the results I can get them and I know that I go out of my way to deliver for the clients I work with.

I do A LOT of pre-screening to make sure they are in the same mindset as I am and that they fully understand this is not an overnight success and it's going to take several months to really see some results for their business, but if done in the right way... it basically becomes an asset vs. temporary success from Google Ads or other temporary forms of marketing that disappear once you stop paying.

The way I'm working on balancing this is that for clients that have a larger budget or seem to be more invested in the idea, I typically pitch longer-term contracts and for those with a smaller budget or who are a bit more hesitant I offer month-month packages to stand out from the competition who are all trying to lock people into 12 month contracts. It's been working well so far, but I agree I'm taking on a bit of risk. I'm cautiously optimistic but I'm always thinking of worst case scenario to make sure I'm ready for anything with this business.



You're 100% right on this one, still kinda funny how it works out that way where the higher-paying clients are also the lowest maintenance. I've basically decided I won't bring on a client for less than $1k per month for new clients in the SEO space and I think to increase even more than that may price me out of some good clients that I've worked with in the past.

I know I could definitely increase my prices, especially as I niche down as it has to be extremely rare for a financial services client to work with someone who provides SEO that knows the financial services industry inside and out and also knows all of the regulations/rules so that I can avoid getting them in trouble with content updates and other items like that.

Definitely a good thing to always question components of my business like this. People were telling me I was crazy for turning away bad low-budget web design clients in the beginning but that made a huge difference for me, so no reason to not consider the same for SEO as well.

When you charge a client $1000, what does that client get? As in how much keyword research, how many landing pages etc?

 

[CoderSales]

Any ideas for the conversion to a more Fastlane space, from a skilled specialized unit (selling websites) to a legacy value system? It's nice to see you ramping up, just want to be careful of getting comfortable in a direct time-for-$$ trade.

So...... how would one set this up? Potentially with automation tools like Zapier for when invoices are taken care of, it alerts the team via Slack, creates a new job in Asana and assigns tasks to VAs. Just a thought that I'm putting out there. I would still have a VA (or pm) want to oversee everything. But at that point, how would you automate the lead sourcing? There's tools for that too but you'd have to vet/pitch the interested parties. MJ, I'm all about the Fastlane world, but how would that be done with an SEO agency? :/

 

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[Empires]

4. Since this is a risk-free offer where they don't pay me anything unless I successfully complete the task that we discussed, I'd imagine the conversion rate (if I'm targeting very specifically and not just taking a scattershot approach) could be around 10% so therefore I'd need to reach out to 40-50 businesses per week to meet the $250k for this year's goal

10% conversion rate seems pretty optimistic.

Assuming you get a 20-25% open rate, you'd need 50% of the people who open your email to convert. That's alot.

Not sure what your sales process is like, but the more complicated it is the lower your conversion rate is going to be.

If it was as simple as them clicking "Sign me up!" Then maybe that would be possible to get a 10% conversion rate, though it is still unlikely. But if it involves a sales call and follow ups, i would be careful of expecting such a high conversion rate.

 

[Templeton]

Great thread mate. Really inspiring. Keep going!

 

[MJ DeMarco]

ew Business Goal: $250,000 in revenue in 2021

July Revenue: $3,000
Aug Revenue: $4,000 (up 33% from last month)
Total Revenue: $16,500

Am I missing something? Where is $200,000 in revenue going to come from in Q4?

Is this the launch of a your new product/service?

Hope you get your personal stuff figured out my friend!

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

August has been my best month ever and between the two businesses I did just over $30k.

Is this web design/seo services and rep management, the 2 businesses?

Is there a spread you can share?

Congrats!

 

[AppMan]

Hey Everyone,

Wanted to provide a quick breakdown for the month of December:

• Found a way to make more money from my existing client base and had some crazy days this month where it showed me the real potential with this business (had one single day this month where I did $6k+ and another day where I did $5k+).
• I'm still not even close to at capacity when I'm doing all the fulfillment myself so the entire focus going into 2023 is going to be around lead gen and getting more clients/prospects in the door.
• This was the first month in a while I didn't have a one-off project with the seo/web business so the revenue on that side dipped off a bit, but the revenue for the rep mgmt business was up over 10k+ from last month
• I know I mentioned it before, but things got so busy I didn't have a chance to do it, but I'm going to cross sell to my rep mgmt customers my web/seo services. A new rep mgmt client asked what my other business was and asked if I could help with SEO so seems like I'm just sitting on money if I don't try to cross sell.

What really made the difference this year was when I had that breakthrough to get highly targeted leads for the rep mgmt business and from there, it was steadily 20k+ months for the last 5 months of the year or so, so that needs to be the focus going forward into this next year.

I'm super grateful for the progress I've made and all of the help I've gotten from the community over the years, and I'm not sure if anyone else on here feels this way either but even with all of the progress I've made, I still feel like it isn't enough and that I'm dropping the ball all the time.

I think I'm my own biggest critic and know the potential this business has so I'm just going to harness that in a positive way and use it to motivate myself to take this thing to the next level.

There's nothing holding me back from 6 figure months, I just need to execute on it, learn from others, and keep going.

Rep Mgmt: $25.7k
SEO/Web Business: $5k

Total for Nov: $30.7k

Great progress, feel jealous of you, but I understand you have worked very hard for a couple of years.
I think you are in the stage when you should hire more people to be able to scale better.

 

[KiwiEC]

Very cool thread, it was a pleasure to read your progression over the years. I bookmarked it and I look forward to get your next update!

May I ask you some details about the tools you used? For example I understood you started web design on WordPress. Did you use a specific builder through it like Divi or Elementor? Did you "just" purchase a theme and improve it?

Did you consider alternatives? Especially WebFlow but also Squarespace or Wix?

As your business is growing, did you use additional tools not directly related to web design? For example I'm thinking of Zapier for automating some part of your business or your customer's websites. Maybe a CRM to track all those leads? Etc, etc.

I started a couple of weeks ago on WordPress. There is so much potential in my region with many small companies needing a website. I'm still learning but I made a lot of progress and my first website is almost ready (I do that one for free, it's a training and a way to gain visibility). Your thread is really motivating, thanks again for sharing.