Feel like your website design work isn’t reaching its full potential?

Perhaps you’re aching to finally reap the profits that inspired you in the first place.

Or maybe the boredom is killing you. Redoing the same basic client tasks on every website is getting to you. You’re more robot than designer, and the creative spark you used to chase is dead or dying.

We’ve been there.

The four of us — Philipp Gohlke, Christian Pott, Hendrik Köhler, and Malte Sieb — bootstrapped the design firm “Websitebutler” back in 2013.

In around five years, we scaled to a team of over 50 that manages thousands of clients. Plus, we get to follow our passion every day — in a business that generates $250,000 USD every month.

The biggest factor in our success?

In-house software.

When you have thousands of clients, tedious design tasks and manual coding just won’t cut it. You need to be fast and agile while still delivering a great custom product. So we created a program that slashed our design time by 70%.

Plus, it combined a set of powerful tools into a beautiful interface. We could use it to communicate with clients, handle revision requests, and manage sales outreach.

After using it with our team and refining it based on their feedback, we decided to release it to the public as Sitejet. It’s the secret sauce behind our rapid growth.

Building our design agency changed our finances and life, and it can do the same for you.

Here’s how.

1. Setting up your business for success

This has been the model we used to catapult our business: using recurring payments. Calculate your monthly recurring revenue, or MRR.

Calculate your expenses and figure out it that means in terms of MRR. We charge between $50–100 USD per month. Once you have enough clients to cover your expenses, everything else is profit!

Two tips before we move on:

First, don’t try to convince clients who complain about your prices. Their business (and the stress it brings) just isn’t worth it.

And second, small projects are the most profitable. It’s faster to convert a small or medium business and design a simple site than it is to seek out bigger, more complex projects that often fall through.

Plus, having multiple small clients gives you a lot of stability and confidence — losing a client is less of a hit with dozens of clients than with a few.

Oh, and a quick word on hourly pricing — don’t do it. Your goal should be to design faster, and you shouldn’t get paid less for faster service. Let your pricing scheme reward you for efficiency.

When you first start out, you’ll want to find a specific industry to target. We recommend looking for local small and medium businesses (SMBs). There are lots of options here, from hairstylists, to restaurants and anything in between.

Decide which type of business like this would be a good match for your expertise or interest, however small it may be. For example, if you’re a craft beer aficionado you might start with local breweries. If you took a college course on fashion design look for local tailors.

As you grow, you can target any kind of SMB, but start with just one industry.

And in that industry, you’ll find your first client! Here’s how.

2. Strategies for your first (and second, and hundredth) client

Scared to sell anything, much less your own skills and expertise?

Don’t be.

When you were first born, you didn’t know how to read or ride a bike. But after some learning and practice they’re second nature.

Selling is the same. It’s a skill you can learn. When it comes to selling websites, it all comes down to just five (okay, six) steps to a sale.

Step 0: Become an expert on the prospect. Learn about your prospect’s company, their industry, and possible challenges they’re facing.

Step 1: Be friendly. When you make a cold call, be friendly and introduce yourself by your first name. Make sure you’ve got the owner on the line.

Step 2: Solve their problems. Don’t talk about your amazing business — show how you can make their business more amazing by helping them get traffic, find customers, or make sales.

Step 3: Prove you’re the perfect team for the job. There are other design firms. Why choose you? Explain your pricing and competitive advantages. (If you’re just starting out and don’t have client success stories, the industry connection from earlier will play a big role here!)

Step 4: Be the expert advisor. Show why their business matters and how you have unique insight into their problems. Explain how a website is the perfect match for that business.

Step 5: Always be closing. If you can, close the sale on the first call. If not, get the prospect to agree to something smaller, like a follow up call.

It can be hard to find your first few customers. Two strategies work well:

First, only charge if the client wants to use the site. Create a draft and only sign on the client if they like it. If they don’t, you can use that draft (with a few changes) for another client later.

Second, charge the ongoing rate without a setup fee. This makes it cheaper for the client to get started upfront, but still leaves plenty of ongoing revenue later on.

The key is to set a goal and stick with it. Set a clear target like $7,000 USD per month 24 months after you kick-off. If you’re charging $100/month, that’s just 70 customers — a pretty reasonable number to reach in two years.

Expect to get 2–3 out of every 100 prospects to sign on with you. In other words, one prospect means 33–50 cold calls. To get 70 prospects, you’d need to contact 2300–3500 SMBs.

It sounds like a lot, but over two years that’s just 5–10 leads per workday. Hustle until you hit your goal.

3. Ramping up sales and marketing

Great! You have a gameplan for getting your first customers. But how do you grow beyond that?

Well, you don’t need investor money!

Use the Lean Startup methodology. The basic premise of the Lean Startup movement is to view your business as a science experiment. Form a hypothesis, run a test, and revise.

For example, start out with payment plans that you believe will succeed. Pitch them hard, but be willing to adjust with a different strategy if the first doesn’t work out.

You should also reinvest as much money as possible to keep growing. By reinvesting everything for two and a half years, we grew to $50,000 USD monthly recurring revenue in that time.

In addition to cold pitching, here are the strategies you can use to scale your growth.

Design a great website. You wouldn’t go to a barber who has a terrible haircut or hire a personal trainer who’s out of shape. So don’t be a website agency with a poor website! With Sitejet, you can use our beautiful template to create a great-looking site right out of the box.

Keep a portfolio. One of the easiest ways to get a new customer is with a portfolio of similar work. Show a hair salon prospect a hair salon site, and you’re more likely to make the sale.

Draft a solid contract. The vast majority of our clients have been amazing, but you need a contract for those rare instances where clients won’t follow through.

Get referrals! Recommendations from other clients are one of the best sales strategies out there. Encourage clients to mention you to their friends.

Form partnerships. You can’t offer everything, so partner with other businesses and share clients. For example, you can send clients a logo designer or social media marketing company and vise-versa. For noncompetitive businesses, this is a great way to find new clients.

Promote with blogs and social media. We’ve found that blogging on our own site and other sites (guest blogging) helped us attract new clients. Plus, being active on social media can help share your message with new prospects.

Use paid ads. The specifics depend on your business, but Google Ads and Facebook have worked well for us.

Network. Connect with other founders in person at events and meetups or online. We found this so valuable, we created a similar community with Sitejet. You can join like-minded founders and scale together.

4. Designing for a growing client base

As you grow your agency, it’s amazing! Every day is exciting, you get to meet and talk to new people, and there’s more and more money.

But it comes with a problem you’ll quickly discover — there’s an insane amount of work!

We chose to build a team (now with more than fifty people) to help us design sites and manage clients. You might want a team or just stay solo — either way is fine. But you’ll need to improve your processes and get faster.

First, start taking notes and keeping documentation. Sure, it’s easy to remember each client’s details when you have a handful. But try remembering the hex color values in 70 different logos!

That’s why we designed Sitejet to include client details and information all in one place. You can keep track of this and start improving your sales process with each and every customer.

It’s also a good idea to set up automatic monthly payments. It’s less of a hassle for you and the client, and neither of you needs to waste time settling invoices.

You’ll start to allocate time differently as well. Focus your efforts on what you do best — website design. If clients ask for other services, find partner businesses you can share referrals with.

Finally, make great customer service a habit. Keep customers staying around with top-notch treatment. After working so hard for a client, why would you give them a reason to leave?

Keep deadlines, be fast and friendly with communication, and reward loyalty.

5. Growing to $10K a month and beyond

Ready, set, grow!

Up to this point, you’ve learned everything you need to scale to a medium sized business. But now, let’s talk about growing to six figures.

First, keep refining your offering. You know it works, but there’s always room for improvement. Keep testing and adjusting what you’re selling to customers.

You can also start adding more services. These tend to be what’s known as “value-added” services, that is, services that aren’t necessary for the basic plan but helpful offerings customers are willing to pay for.

For example, you could include extra domains or directory listings. You can also partner with a company, like we’ve mentioned a few other times, for assets like logos or photography.

When it comes to scaling, few things are as important as building a team. But first, don’t be too eager to hire. You need to pay employees whether you make money or not, so wait until you have reliable and consistent income. Outsource to freelancers before hiring employees.

Use those processes you wrote down earlier to coach your workers and deliver great quality 100% of the time. Build a company culture early on, because it will develop whether you make a conscious effort to work on it or not.

6. Plugging it all in with Sitejet

With that, you’ve learned just about everything you need to know to grow your own agency!

Before we wrap up though, we want to take a quick detour and explain how Sitejet can make this process a breeze.

Sitejet is really just plug-and-play software for building a recurring revenue website design business. It lets designers like you create beautiful sites in record time, all while seamlessly managing client relationships and interaction.

When we first started, it was just an in-house piece of software. In fact, we created (and still run) over 4,000 SMB websites using Sitejet. It’s the perfect system for a recurring revenue model, and we’re proof that it works.

Sitejet makes the design process easy. The templates and processes are built into the platform, so you can learn from our mishaps.

To get started, you’ll just create a new page from the agency template. Enter your company details (like contact info) and customize the color scheme and logo to fit your brand.

You’ll also want to adjust the pricing schemes to represent your models and tiers.

And that’s it!

Within just a few minutes of starting out with Sitejet, you can build a fully functional monthly recurring revenue business and start selling websites to any type of industry.

Using what you’ve learned to build a successful agency

Now you’ve got the information it takes to build the agency you’ve always dreamed of.

But… we actually didn’t cover the most important part: you.

Sitejet is a great system that makes the process fast and seamless. And the advice we’ve laid out here will save you countless hours of frustration and get you on the right track for success.

But the truth? The reason we succeeded was because we took action. We got started. Not after reading a few more blog posts about building an agency, or “keeping it in mind” while we did other things.

We took action. And that’s the only way you’ll reach the same kind of success.

And if you’re an action-taker, too, we’d like to invite you to try out Sitejet. In 30 minutes, you can start pitching clients and building the business you know is deep inside of you.

Why wait? Get started here

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