If you’re overworked, underpaid, and doing every single part of your web design business alone, the problem usually isn’t your skills.

It’s that no one ever showed you how to build the business around the work: how to price it, structure it, and share the load so it actually lasts.

In this episode I mention my Sparks mentoring community. You can join here: https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk/sparks-group-mentoring/

Welcome to another episode of Websites Made Simple with me, Holly Christie.

In this episode, I’m talking about how to build a sustainable web design business, one that pays you properly, doesn’t burn you out, and works for you and your clients, whatever stage of your career you’re at.

We get into:

How undercharging and “building a portfolio for free” quietly stalls your business

Why collaboration, not competition, with designers, copywriters and SEO specialists grows your income

Why every website project really starts with copy and brand, not the build

How to work out your offer and review it so it keeps working for you

Why going limited and separating your finances protects you through feast and famine months

Why the money from a website build is business income, not your salary

Where to outsource so you stop overworking and stop burning out

Why you have to step off the tools and spend time working ON your business

How to spot the money gap between what you charge and what you actually want to earn

Why a mentor is the single biggest lever for growing your business

If you want a business that earns well, runs smoothly, and doesn’t leave you exhausted, this one’s for you.

Come and find out more at https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk

Email me at [email protected]

Chapters (So you can skip to the relevant bits):

00:00 Building a web design business that lasts

00:20 The undercharging trap

01:31 Collaborate, don’t compete

03:41 Why copy and brand come before the build

05:49 Inside Sparks Group mentoring

06:53 Work out your offer, and review it often

08:35 Go limited and separate your finances

10:24 Website payments are income, not your salary

11:13 Outsource what isn’t worth your hourly rate

14:15 Work ON your business, not just in it

18:54 Mind the money gap

Mentioned in this episode:

Join my Sparks Group Mentoring Programme

In this episode, I'm gonna be talking about how to build a

sustainable web design business.

So if you are a website designer, you're a website developer, it doesn't

matter whereabouts in your career that you are, this episode is here for you.

Hello and welcome to websites Made Simple, the podcast to support website

designers and developers in having the very best web design business they can

and earning a good amount of money while they do it as well, because, I dunno

about you, but I know a huge amount of website designers and developers who

come into my network, who come into my mentoring programmes, who all start off

under charging because they think that they need to build up a portfolio before

they can get going with their business.

And they believe that the only way to build that portfolio

is to do it on a makes rate or a skills squat or any anyway.

That means that they're not actually being paid for the skills that

they're bringing into the table here.

And I have a very strong work ethic around we do not work for free.

We do not work for too little money as well.

And we build the business that works for us and for our clients.

So if you're ready to spend a bit of time with me today to find out how to

do that and how to apply it for your business, then let's get started.

So the very first thing I want to suggest is that you collaborate with

others in your web design business.

And we know there is the stereotypical website designer that they're hunched

over their keyboard, they're there in a hoodie and jeans, they might have

their earbuds in, they might not.

And ultimately they are working there in isolation.

And if we want to stretch that stereotype a little bit further, they'll also be

talking in tech jargon and they generally will avoid any in-person meetings

and most likely phone calls as well.

And that is so far removed from what website designers and developers

are showing up as today showing.

I mean, granted, there are still some people who would prefer their own

company and who wear hoodies in the industry and that is absolutely on them.

But I can assure you the more you collaborate, the more money you'll

make, the less stressed you'll feel about projects and the happier

you will be in your business.

And when I say about collaborating, it can be with other website designers 'cause

that can always be really helpful when you have too much work and you might wanna

come bring someone in as a white labeler or whether you've been asked to work on

a project that's slightly outside of your skillset and you just want the reassurance

of someone else who you work with as well.

It could be copywriters, it could be SEO specialists.

I can tell you if you go on LinkedIn connect with some SEO

specialists, you are gonna learn so much more about the industry.

So it's absolutely worth doing.

Could also be branding designers and um.

Copywriters as well.

But these are the key people who are going to help you to build a

really, really good business because we know that website projects don't

begin and end with the website build.

I mean, essentially they begin with the copy and the brand.

And we want to be able to support our clients in getting over the hurdle

of booking the website and getting started with the website because we

only get paid when the work happens.

But often people will really still, at the copywriting stage, they will

think, I can write this myself.

I know about my own industry, that's why I work in the industry.

But writing about your industry in a way that pulls people in through

the website and working in your industry are two different things.

Now, as a web designer, a developer and a copywriter, if you're listening, you are

gonna know that, but your client isn't.

And so if they come to you as the website designer or developer as their first port

of call, you really want to be able to say to them, let's talk about copywriting.

Because the copy is going to be what influences the user experience, what

helps people with, uh, you know, clicking on and buying products

or services through the website.

It's also gonna influence the SEO as well.

So having someone in your network, or a few people in your network

who you can recommend, who you know that you work well with, is always

going to be a really good thing.

And that goes for working with SEO specialists and

branding designers as well.

And I personally really grew my business when I started working

with a branding designer.

We had gotten on very well and I had used her for my own branding.

Then I started sending clients her way.

And I just knew that my clients were always gonna have a really

good experience of working with her.

And the same with the copywriters who I've recommended.

I always know that my clients are safe with these people and that

we're gonna have good work and it's gonna be delivered on time.

And that really helped to cement my reputation, not only as a great

website designer, but someone who was well connected and who could put all

of the parts of the website together for my clients, and essentially

project manager it all as well.

And it also meant because I was recommending these people for my

clients, it also meant that they were recommending me to their clients.

So my business grew a lot once I started collaborating.

And I have my Sparks Group mentoring programme, which is a weekly hot seat

group mentoring session, and it's full of website designers and developers and

SEO specialists and copywriters, and SEO copywriters, and everybody works together.

They collaborate, they recommend each other.

We have a group chat where people themselves, can someone

write me some CSS for this?

Or can someone do that?

And it's a real joy to see, and I promise you it's not a requirement

of sparks that everyone collaborates.

It's just that's the vibe in the group.

I always say we're about collaboration, not competition.

And if you view your web design business as that, that you are a collaborator,

not a competitor, it's gonna massively open up the market for who you work with.

It's gonna open up your mindset and it's gonna do really good

things for your business.

So that is an absolute essential one out there is collaborate with others.

I completely recommend it.

So the next thing I'd like to say is work out what it's you are offering

and review whether it's working for you and do this regularly, because

the more experienced you get and with every new website build, you do every

new client you bring on, you're getting a little bit more experience as well.

And when we start out with websites, we tend to just build anything.

We think, oh, thank God someone's gonna be paying our bills this month.

Yes, I'll do it.

But that's not always gonna be right for you.

And I would say, you know, niche as much as you can into, maybe you want

to do high volume amount of budget websites, or maybe you want to go into

kind of more expensive bespoke sites.

Maybe you want to just have your business as doing website maintenance

and care plans and advisory.

Or some people run their business doing just kind of power hours and fix it hours.

Or there's website hosting maintenance contracts that people

sign up to that has a certain amount of kind of that blog uploads and

things like that in them as well.

How you run your business will be unique to you.

But what's really important is you make sure that it keeps working for you.

Because if you become unhappy with a service that you are providing or a

product you've got, that unhappiness is going to kind of leach out

into the communication with your clients and your clients will lose a

little bit of trust in you as well.

So it's important that you always feel really aligned with what you

are working on and that will change.

The more experience you get, the more it will change.

And that's okay.

Just stick with what works for you as well.

So one of the things that I think is a little bit niche, but I have worked with

website designers who are sole traders, who are limited companies who are cics.

I've worked with people at all different stages and the one thing

that I have always found very helpful and I practised it myself, and it

is something we can cover sometimes as part of my mentoring programme.

Something that we can look on at when I do as part of my mentoring

programme, is actually registering your business as a limited company.

And one of the reasons that I recommend that you do this separately to being

a sole trader is keeping the company finances separate from your own

finances can be really, really useful.

And there are also some different reasons that I would recommend that

you speak to your accountant about your tax relief and stuff like that.

But one of the reasons I say having your company money separately is because

it doesn't matter how experienced you are, it's you will have feast and

famine months within the industry.

You know, everyone sat there in that January thinking, holy

smokes, how am I gonna keep going?

Or I need to book some website builds right now.

And yeah, other pe other times we'll be there in like the September and thinking,

oh my gosh, I've got too much going on.

Everything needs to be done by Christmas.

I need to get some white labelers involved as well.

And having that in a separate bank account with separate cashflow managed

by an accountant can be absolutely worth its weight in gold because, and

I promise you this ties in, and I did a podcast episode not too long ago

about why it's really important to outsource in your web design business.

And this came directly from one of my mentoring sessions in the

Sparks Group, where we realised that some of the people who were in

the group were bottlenecking money.

They were getting the money in for for a website build.

And they would see that money as salary, not as income for the business.

So let's just take a figure of 3000 pounds, I dunno how much the website build

was, but let's say it was 3000 pounds.

It comes into the company and immediately they think, oh, thank

goodness that's two months salary paid, or one month salary paid, or

whatever it is that they're earning.

But that's not actually the case because that money comes into the business and

then we need to look at using a portion of it to pay the software that we are

using to build the website with and for paying the hosting and then all the other

bits and pieces that make up the company.

And one of the things that website designers and developers can tend

to do is they overwork on areas that they could outsource to

someone like a va, for example.

If you have to make changes to a lot of images, and that could be that you've

gotta put coloured gradients on them or you've gotta put text over them or they'll

need resizing, that is not worth your time as a website designer or a developer

at, let's say you are doing your time at 75 pounds an hour when you could have a

VA working on that at 38 pounds an hour.

And you could be using your time to finish off the website builds to do some of your

marketing set up as a limited company.

To run your accounts, whatever it is that you could be doing in that time.

You don't want to be doing it faffing around with images or

something that a VA could do.

Or when I get busy and I absolutely do practise what I preach.

I'm just starting another two custom website built side by side at the moment

and I have paid a white labeler to copy dump all of the website content in

there so that I can just go in there.

It's gonna save me hours, hours of time because it's already in there

as titles and textbook and I can just go in and start designing and

building and I don't have to read everything and put it all down there.

I know where I'm at with this as well.

And the next job for that freelancer is to, uh, do the

images for the site as well.

So trust me, outsourcing is a really big part of having a website design business.

One that you didn't, you are not going to burn out in because you are not

doing all the things you don't think, oh, I've spent the whole day designing.

Oh gosh, I haven't done all the invoices for today.

I haven't done my marketing, I haven't replied to anyone on LinkedIn.

I haven't replied to the email of that person who was

inquiring about working with me.

This gives you the opportunity to do that.

And it might be a case of you absolutely love doing your images, but

you don't like replying to clients.

Again, just mix it up, get a really good VA who can manage your

email address or whatever else.

But one of the things is we think as website designers and going back

to that stereotype of, you know, we all sit there working alone, that

we've actually gotta be alone in our businesses and we absolutely don't.

And, you know, collaboration is so important.

Outsourcing helps us kind of contribute to within the economy and

pay other people's salaries as well.

Without that fear of, oh my gosh, I'm paying their mortgage.

So it's a really good thing as well to do.

So do really consider, have a thing and think, where could I outsource?

And even if it doesn't feel like the money or the payback from it is coming

to me immediately when I've actually won more business through having time to

do my marketing or whatever it is that works for you, you will realise that

actually outsourcing is paying for itself.

So it's really important.

So another thing that I wanted to talk to you about is about spending

time working on your business.

Because we can have this habit, especially as creatives.

Like I love the creative brain.

I mean, I drive people around me crazy, but the creative brain just

goes, oh, what's my next project?

What's the next one?

And the next one and the next one.

And that's great until you realise that there's you, you are coming to

the ends of a loaded website, builds.

It might be when it's starting to go into a quiet time and you

actually don't have a strategy.

You dunno where you know where you're going forward with it

or what you should be doing.

You know, you've just been on that hamster wheel of getting work and doing the work.

And as much as I have the creative brain, I'm also really good at strategy as well.

And I also go on planning days where I pay to go on days where I'm guided

through how to work on my business, how to plan for the next 90 days, how to

plan for the next six months, how to plan for the next year, and how to have

the overarching overview of everything.

And okay, I did do one last year, which was brilliant, but it was

projecting the next five years.

I thought I just can't plan that far ahead.

I dunno what tools I'm gonna have, I dunno what's you know, gonna be available.

So for me, kind of the next year or two years, having a detailed plan of the

next year and an overarching plan of next two to three years is what works for me.

But it's really important that you spend time looking at all the

areas of your business as well and creating actionable goals around them.

So for example, where I was saying about work out what it is you are offering

and review, whether it's really working for you, spending some time actually

working on the business allows you.

Oh my goodness, I do not want to be doing this area of my work in

two years time and it's just too stressful or I don't like it.

Or it could be that one time I was working on my business and I decided

that I wanted to have enough hosting and maintenance monthly contracts come

in, that it would pay for my salary and the business expenses and that would be

like my bare minimum if that would just come from that one stream of income.

And then anything else over that, you know, goes into profit, it

goes into more planning days.

So I can do better things with it and yeah, I can set up more

services and things like that.

So these, having these times where you step away from your business so

that you can work on your business is really, really important because you are

then going to set actionable goals and hopefully you will also award yourself

an accountability partner to make sure that you are achieving those as well.

And that part of it is really important.

And what I tend to do is I tend to use my long suffering best friends

as my accountability partners.

They are both really professional people.

And so if I say to them, can you check in with me about this on this date and

time, can you do this and that then they will do it and I'll know that it's coming

up 'cause we've all got in the calendar.

What I try not to do as much is use my freelancer fellow creative friends to

do this with as well because they're off doing their own thing and they might

think, oh, I don't really wanna jog her, or they might forget or whatever else.

So just sometimes stepping outta the bubble of the people who I'm

working with on a daily basis can really help with that as well.

And if you are in interested in having planning day, spending some time working

on your business, meeting some people who you can collaborate with as well.

I'm gonna be running some planning days towards the autumn, um, winter of this

year so that we can get nice and set up so we can handle that pre-Christmas

rush and we can also spread things out ready for that quiet time in January

and as things start to pick up again.

So if that's something you would be interested in, email me at hello at

websites made simple co uk I will reply to your email only I manage that

email address so you do get me and I'll be able to give you more plans

and information as and when it becomes available as well, which is code for

once I found the right venue for us.

But it's gonna be good and it's gonna be very transformative

for your career as well.

So I've just got a couple more that I want to run through with you as well.

And one is about the money gap in website design.

So I've talked about setting up as a limited company so that you can really

handle your finances separately to to the rest of your money as well.

I've talked about doing what really works for you and where you really

feel lit up by your work as well.

And I finally want to talk about money, rather look at what you would like

to earn, what you are charging for, what you're currently offering and

whether you can get there doing that.

Because a lot of time people think, oh, I would love to spend, let's just

say for example, 60,000 a year, but they're actually only charging 1500

pounds for a website and then it's taken them a month to build that website.

And they might have two websites on the go.

And so they might even be getting 3000 pounds a month, but that

isn't going to get them anywhere near, they're still 2000 pounds a

month short of their 60,000 a year.

And it's then looking at where are the money gaps and how do we fill those gaps.

And I promise you I will do another episode on how we earn money as

website designers because we tend not to do it all from one place.

So for example, I earn money through my website builds, I earn money through my

website clinic, which are power hours where people can come and work through

some problems with me in that time.

I also run workshops and master classes.

Those come in as kind of one-off payments.

I have my mentoring programmes that gives monthly payments and I have my website

hosting maintenance services as well.

And then you put all of that in the pot and it's what makes it work as well.

But it's really important that you list out the different services that you offer,

how much you're charging for them and what you need to do to be able to, one, reach

the go, the financial goal you have, but two, to be able to reach that financial

goal and include the, the expenses you have along the way of things like

hostings and theme licences and plugins and all that sort of thing as well.

And finally, I would recommend that you look at getting a mentor.

Now, obviously I do mentor website designers and developers, and I work

with people at all levels, whether that's really newly setting up and in the first

couple of years or whether like me, you've been in business for 10 plus years and

you are looking to tighten things up.

You wanna get to the next level, you wanna review your services.

You can come and work with me on all of those levels.

And you can go to the website's made simple website, uk and you can see

the offer offerings that I have there.

I also have one-to-one mentoring calls, just one-off sessions.

And that could be that you've maybe given the final draught of a website to a client

and they haven't looked and liked it.

And we can talk through what you could do to improve that website

or how to handle the client.

We also I work on crisis calls with people when it's all looking like

it's gonna fall out bed with a client.

You want to make sure you get paid, you want to be able to handle the next steps.

You can get in touch with me through those one-off sessions as well.

But whether you choose to work with me or whether you choose to work with

someone else, having a mentor is the single most thing that will increase

your opportunities in your website design and development business as well.

Learning from someone who has been there, who's seen the mistakes, who can help show

you the opportunities that are available to you and just help you structure things,

whether that's with the creative side of the business or whether that's looking

at your processes behind the scenes, it is something that will absolutely

pay for itself over and over again.

You'll see with my mentoring programmes, which are six month programmes, that

they are priced at the price point of relatively lower price point custom

build websites because I know that if we work together one-to-one and in

group settings over six months, you will secure a custom build website,

which will pay for that programme.

You'll secure much more than that, but that's how I priced it for you as well.

And again, I put my money where my mouth is.

I often have coaching, mentoring, I've just come off the back of a planning

day, which is a coaching day as well.

And every time it's really influenced my business and I want

to help you to influence yours in all the most positive of ways.

So that's us for this week.

I hope it's given you a lot to think about.

Do get in touch with me.

I'd love to hear from you.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode.

You can reach me at hello at websites made simple co uk.

You can also find me on LinkedIn as Holly c Christie.

Come and drop me a dm. I would love to hear from you and I will

see you again on the podcast soon.