If you're putting in the work, showing up, doing everything you can — and still turning over the same amount of money year on year — this episode is for you.

Check out my popular group mentoring programme: https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk/sparks-group-mentoring/

It's a supportive group mentoring session for website designers and developers to bring their questions, roadblocks, ideas, and "is it just me?" moments.

Hi and welcome to another episode of Websites Made Simple with me, Holly Christie.

In this episode, I'm talking about the money mindset patterns that can sometimes keep web designers stuck, what it actually means to outsource and invest in your business, and how to get out of your own way so you can finally start earning what you deserve.

We get into:

• Why so many web designers drop their prices before the client has even had a chance to respond
• The power of the pause
• Why payment plans for hosting and maintenance are non-negotiable recurring revenue
• What a money mindset ceiling looks like, and why it keeps you stuck at the same figure
• The real maths behind outsourcing to a VA
• Why website designers bottleneck their own businesses
• My personal story of working every evening after the kids went to bed
• How to get out of your own way, stop doing everything yourself, and start running a business that actually works for you

If you're working hard but not seeing the financial results to match, this episode will show you exactly what's holding you back — and it might just be you.

Come and find out more at https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk or email me at [email protected]

Skip to the good bits:

00:00 What's really holding back your web design business

01:17 Turning over the same money year on year — why it happens

02:00 What levelling up really means

02:44 Self-sabotaging behaviours — do any of these sound like you?

05:47 Why even getting a client on a call earns your seat at the table

07:27 Money mindset ceilings: stuck at the same income figure

10:03 Outsourcing to a VA: the real numbers

12:19 "You're halving your hourly rate" — the hard truth from a good friend

13:55 Get out of your own way and earn what you deserve

Mentioned in this episode:

Remember to sign up for our blogging masterclass!

Go to https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk/masterclass

Blogging masterclass

In today's episode, we are going to get real about what is holding you

back from having the website design career that you always dreamed about.

Because trust me, it's not a case of you need to learn new design skills, or you

just need to get over this, or you just need to get that project out the door.

Most likely, what is stopping you right now is you, and we are

gonna get to the bottom of it.

You ready?

Let's get started.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Websites Made

Simple with me, Holly Christie.

I am a website designer, website designer's mentor, host of this podcast,

and I am here to help you have an absolutely brilliant website career

without self-sabotaging along the way.

I will admit that this episode has been completely inspired by my mentees

through my Sparks group mentoring program and my Phoenix mentoring program.

And the reason that these two programs exist is because there are website

designers out there who really, really want to get to the next stage of their

career, and they're just hitting the same boundaries over and over again.

And that's usually a money boundary.

And it might be a case of you're turning over the same amount

of money year on year, and you think, "But I'm busier than ever.

I'm really putting my marketing in there.

I'm really, I'm showing up on LinkedIn.

I'm guesting on other people's podcasts.

I'm doing everything I can.

Why aren't I earning more money?" And there's a lot of reasons that

come into this, and I mean, the main one really is money mindset.

And it can be really difficult when leveling up because there's that

expression, if you want to have something you've never had, you need

to do something you've never done.

So often we think that means a skill set.

We think that it means we need to learn to, you know, code a bit better

or design a bit harder or slicken our processes. And yeah, that's all great

stuff, and if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that

I always work to best practices, and I absolutely implore you to do the same.

So yeah, do all of those things.

But one of the things that we often haven't done is allowed ourselves

to really, get to grips with what leveling up, what dreaming big

for our businesses really means.

It starts with us, and everything else comes back from here.

Now I know that you are just one person listening to or watching this podcast, so

if I say hands up if, you have done these behaviors or think that you may have done

these behaviors, I'm not gonna see it, so you don't have to put your hand up.

But do listen out and tell me if any of these sound like you

Dropping your prices while you are mid-call or mid-email, just

mid-discussion with the clients.

So it could be that you've quoted a figure that you would really like to

earn from this project, but you are a little bit uncomfortable because that

figure is a bit of a stretch for you because you've not earned that before

or you've not charged that many times.

It could be that you've just leveled up to charging £3,000 for a website

and you quote that to the client and you say, "Yep, but if you sign up

today, I will knock £500 off it. Let me know if you have done that before a

client has even had a chance to speak, before they have had the chance to

consider the amount or say anything.

Because I know I've done it.

I know that I've done it completely unprompted, where I've really liked

the client and I've wanted to work with them, or I felt uncomfortable about the

figure, and I know that a lot of people who I have mentored have done the same.

And the first thing I want to do is to encourage you to put

the price out there and pause.

Because when you create that space, you create the space for the client to

consider it, to remember this is the first time that they are hearing that figure.

And this isn't necessarily gonna be a big figure or, outside the

realm of what they were thinking of.

Just pause.

It gives them some space, and it stops that nervous energy with you.

Because within that pause, you get the opportunity to say to yourself, "I

would really like to earn that from this project, and my work is worth it." So

pause, and then wait for their reply.

Now, this could be that you're doing it over email, so you naturally

do have to wait for a reply.

Could be that you're doing it on a Zoom call, and their reply might be something

that's along the lines of, "Yeah, that's great, but It was a bit more

than I was expecting to pay." And you have the opportunity to pause again,

and rather than drop the price, say, "I appreciate that, and I appreciate

that you may need to think about it.

What I can say is that that price reflects the quality of work and the website that

you're going to get at the end of this.

But have a think about it.

Let me know.

I look forward to hearing from you soon." We don't want to

force people to work with us.

But having that pause actually just removes that nervous energy

because when you have that nervous energy, people pick up on it.

And when you pause, when you take a breath and remind yourself you've

earned your seat at the table.

Even getting a client onto a call, you know, not every website designer can do

that, or they don't do it comfortably.

So just pause and wait and charge what you're worth.

Don't undercut yourself, and certainly don't undercut yourself immediately.

And one of the things that people in any industry can really suffer with,

but I'm gonna say particularly in the web design industry because that's who

I work with, is when you're leveling up, you know, year on year, we want to be

making more money because, well, we do.

We want it to reflect our experience.

We want it to reflect our work.

We want to meet the inflation rates, all that sort of thing,

so we want to earn more money.

That there's a difference between earning a bit more money because we're increasing

the prices of our payment plans or we're doing more websites, so we're getting

more people that are on payment plan.

And if you don't have payment plans, for website hosting and maintenance, then

you're really missing a trick because it's great recurring revenue, and it keeps

your clients on your client list as well.

So when they need some, rework on their websites and stuff like

that, they naturally come to you.

And if that's something that you haven't explored yet, and that's

something you would like to explore with me, then just drop me a line at

[email protected] or come and find me on LinkedIn at Holly C. Christie,

and we can schedule some time together, and I can walk through what would feel

like some good options for you to get that started. When we're looking to level up,

we're looking to level up and make quite a lot more money, so not just increasing

the prices of our payment plans.

It could be that we are doing big jumps with how much we're charging for websites.

It could be that we are hoping to produce more websites each year.

It could even be that we are starting to work with some white labelers so

that we can pull in some more work and, get more websites out there.

Often, what's really stopping us from this is us.

We've never earned that much money before, so essentially we think that

we don't know how to, and it's where so many people get stuck at a certain figure

within their business, and they just, it doesn't matter what they do, they don't

seem to be turning over any more money.

And it's because they've got that mindset block of they don't know how to do it.

They don't know what it would look like to have X amount of more money in the bank.

And the ways that we do this, it's never a conscious thing because obviously

we all want to hit six figures.

Some people want to hit seven or eight figures.

But we all want to have that really comfortable lifestyle, and

we all want to feel really well rewarded for our work as well.

And so the ways that this can show up is that we can really bottleneck within

our businesses when it comes to money.

You have quoted for a website.

Let's use that 3,000 pound figure again.

You've quoted 3,000 pounds for a website.

The client's agreed to pay 3,000 pounds for a website, and immediately in

your mind you think, "Right, I have earned 3,000 pounds." In theory, no.

It means that you now have £3,000 coming into your business.

This is assuming, you know, that the website makes it all the way through

and, you know, the client pays up willingly for it at the end and

everything runs beautifully on time.

And when that's done, there is £3,000 in the business.

But this is not a solely earning amount of money.

Yes, you should be taking a salary from your business, but your salary shouldn't

be dependent on every bit of money that goes in there because we can find with

web design, because you can run it on quite a scrappy setup, I mean, essentially

all you really need is a laptop, some hosting, and a license for a good theme.

Or, you know, if you're a really techy dev, you don't even need

to pay for a theme license there.

And off you go.

It's really easy to think that we don't need to distribute money

any other way within the business.

We pay our hosting fees, we pay our theme fees, you pay your insurance

fee, and you're kind of there.

But actually, in that same way that you need to spend money to make money,

and rather than spend money, I'm gonna say you need to invest money

to make money, this is the same.

So when you bring money into your business, when you earn it, what you

really need to think about is what is the best way to distribute this?

How is this going to serve the business so that I can go on to make more money?

I was discussing this in our group mentoring session yesterday with one

of the lovely mentees who was saying that one of her roles, and you'll know

this well as a web designer, is that a particular client wanted an image

overlay on every image, and it had to be a gradient, and the gradient had to

work and run in a certain direction.

And so this web designer was using Canva to do that.

And across the website there were, you know, maybe 30 or 40 images, and

she was saying, "Oh, it's just, you know, it's repetitive." It's, uh, not

a waste of time, but it's not a good use of a website designer's time.

So we explored about what it would look like to use a VA to do that,

and that the reality of how much that would cost for a VA to do that.

And I've got a brilliant VA. She is really good at design and stuff like that.

It would probably take her an hour to do those, to deliver that, and that

would cost me, I think, £38 for the hour. If I handed that over to her, that

gives me an extra hour to be running a mentoring session at 150 pounds an

hour, to be running a website clinic at 150 pounds an hour, to be working on a

website build, to be doing marketing, to be pulling in more business.

So it is not worth my time or saving 38 pounds to do those kind of work myself.

As website designers, because we have that skill set, we often

forget that we don't have to do it.

Just because we can do it, we don't have to do it.

And actually, if we outsource some of this stuff, we are actually supporting

another freelancer as well, someone else within their own business.

They're supporting us.

It's a good two-way arrangement, but it also frees up the time for us to

use it where it is more valuable.

A lot of the time, website designers will bottleneck in their business when it comes

to money, when it comes to work like this.

And trust me, I've been there.

I've done it myself.

One of my really good friends, Ally, she came over a couple of years ago,

and we were talking about work, and I was saying about, "Oh, yeah, I do all

of this during the day, and then at night, you know, once I put the kids to

bed, I'll get out the laptop, and then I'll start working again." And she says,

"How many nights a week do you do that?"

And I said, "Well, yeah, five, you know, every workday." She's like, "How many

hours are you doing that for?" I said, "Well, probably about three or something."

She said, "So you're essentially halving your hourly rate." And I said

to her, "No, no, you just don't get it.

You know, you don't have your own business.

You don't get that we have to work around the clock."

She's like, "No, I do get it.

I've watched you run your own business for, like, um, over a decade.

I do get it.

You're absolutely devaluing your time." And when I really stopped and

thought about it, I also thought that when I was working in the evenings,

I am not nearly as productive, particularly when it comes to design.

It will take me a lot longer to do something that actually, if I was

just properly rested, I'd be able to blast out the next day as well.

It might be a case of I was also doing jobs that weren't serving

me, like the stuff that a VA could do as well, and I had become my

own bottleneck within my business.

And it meant that I actually went on to work with some mentors as well, and

we streamlined parts of the business.

We just tweaked things.

We changed some pricing.

We got some VAs on board, and it absolutely revolutionized stuff as well.

And you know what?

The more that I spent out doing this, the more that I was like,

"Right, I'm gonna book five hours or 10 hours a week with a VA.

I'm gonna book this, that, and the other," the more money I actually

ended up turning over in my business, the more I earned from it.

But also, I was happier with it.

I went on to earn a lot more in my business than I had ever earned

with it before that, and I learned really to get out of my own way.

Yes, I can do everything in my business.

Should I be doing everything in my business?

No.

Do I want to be doing everything in my business?

No, not at all.

And it's really about that letting go to be happy within your business,

letting go to give some time back for yourself, and understanding that

just because you work for yourself, it doesn't mean that you have to work

every hour that there is to yourself.

I mean, the beauty is to really create a business that still runs without

you, that you can step away from, that you only get involved in the bits that

you want to, that you only design the websites for the people that you want

to as well. So if there's any message I can give you is get out of your own

way, stop bottlenecking your business, and have some faith and confidence in

yourself that you can do this, that you can earn a really good salary, and you

can be really happy in your business.

And if this is something that you would like to explore with

working together, then I would absolutely love to hear from you.

Drop me an email at [email protected].

Come find me on LinkedIn at Holly C. Christie.

And yeah, I'd love to help you have a better business.

So until next time, go and have a look, go and see where you're the

bottleneck and what you can do about it.