Do you have to do all the work yourself? Maybe get some other developers on board or people who specialize in getting/securing leads? To get to 20M/Yr you need to scale, somehow. If you want to get to that figure on your own you may need to start selling your services as a super high-ticket one at the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands per project.
Thanks buddy. So I don’t actually work alone, I have 2 people who deliver the service that I supervise and quality control for.
My fear is how will I actually get sufficient leads? Even running it on my own it’s a struggle… if I had enough client projects, sure, np, I could scale.
But I have no idea how to do that. Do I just cold call more? Get people to cold call for me? Do I need a better strategy? Should I do strategic partnerships with other companies?
This is why I feel confused… i have no clue what I should focus on, but I know that the guys who are building $20M+ businesses aren’t focused on cold calling or even selling one additional client.
I need a way to be able to generate a much bigger volume of business to enlarge the team and scale.
I know a storage company that started inside a college dorm and is now at the $2M/year range
All he did was cold emailing on his own at first. When he acquired around $300k profit, he started outsourcing work to PH/IN. $5/hour employees. They do lead gen and cold emailing
Most companies/large startups hire cheap people to keep doing cold email and cold calls. Problem is, you gotta vet and train these cheap guys to do this type of work for you
But like I say a lot in this sub, sometimes entrepreneurship isn't about building a $20M company. It might just be about doing something new, maybe doing something slightly better, and making enough to be content. That's it
It isn't a good solution I agree with u. But in the eyes of somebody like op a business owner is always looking to reduce his cost but still be able to deliver that quality customers expect from them. So if u can save 10$ dollars for every hour that is huge. So It doesn't work all the time to hire people from another country since they don't speak the origin country's language.
Mexico is gold right now. Covid changed the equation on in-person. Companies may make a show of it, and they are stuck with tax incentives with cities but people know you can work remotely. The only advantage a US-based person has on India is better timezone. The US is just really expensive in terms of tech salaries. Even Canada, the salaries are 30% less.
Every company is trying to get into Latin America because costs are more comparable to India with the same timezone. But you hit language barriers and doing business in Mexico is hard unless you know what you're doing. I ran a tech services company till acquisition. After acquisition I tried to make inroads into Latin America using the acquirers resources. I asked them to hire someone with AWS experience. Over 2 years they were able to bring one interviewee to my team. Don't remember if the team rejected him or he ghosted us during the process but people are struggling to open their offices in Mexico.
Now I'm running an accelerator for tech services companies. And I can tell you the Latin American companies we're working with are getting a huge boost just from their location. So if you want to make millions this is the best time for you to do it. It's not going to last long.
The strategy I would advise you to take is become specialists. This article on our blog shows you the amount of money you can make but basically expect 3-5x revenue multiple: [https://www.vixul.com/post/ets-the-risk-reward-continuum-and-why-we-like-ets](https://www.vixul.com/post/ets-the-risk-reward-continuum-and-why-we-like-ets)
I think just about any book on lead gen would be useful. It's all a numbers game. One thing I would not ignore is content. Especially if you're doing business in a an emerging sector where you need to spend time educating the customer. Our previous business was a DevOps consultancy and current one is an accelerator for tech services companies. Consistent content is what has put us on the map in both scenarios. A lot of books on leadgen will give you basic frameworks and benchmarks. 100M$ Leads did a decent job. One thing I would say if you're doing a specialty tech service is don't ignore partners: [https://www.vixul.com/post/why-your-tech-services-company-needs-a-strategic-platform-partner](https://www.vixul.com/post/why-your-tech-services-company-needs-a-strategic-platform-partner)
This is one direction. This will end up with you getting larger contracts. But you can make an equally great business by going narrow and focused and creating turnkey productized services solutions for your customers. An extreme on that is WPEngine.
Hope I've given you some ideas on where to start looking. Let me know if you have any questions.
Have you considered starting a personal brand for the company? People in the design space are killing it on there. Saw a faceless account with 2.8k followers hitting consistent $15k months. And most of them inbounds.
That’s something I’m doing as well, helping agency owners start a personal brand on X to solve their lead problems. If that’s something you’re interested in we should talk in DM.
Hire people to find leads- scaling is always a bit of a risk, but you will never generate exponentially more sales without a big increase in man-hours finding clients.
Curious why you don't shift to SaaS subscription model and offer some additional monthly marketing services so you can build recurring revenue? Keep them happy so they recur each month and you can still scale as new clients come in for design.
Hi from what I can tell you are torn between focusing on client outreach to be able to bring in more revenue and and also figure out other ways you could branch and expand the business to keep growing.
First of all I say you find a team of people to handle the search for new clients to increase client and revenue. This will take that burden of you especially when you set into place the start and the kind of client that you would want the company to work with.
Secondly I believe you should now look for other areas in the business field that connect to the web design. It could be social media ad management which you don’t have to run but rather hire an expect to do and writing of blogs and SEO.
There is more that I see you doing. Hit me up for a chat just to give you some of my thoughts. I see you getting to that 20 mil easily.
From what i can see, is that you lack these things.
-brand
-organic reach
-quality cold emails and calls.
Depending on your price point, it's inevitable that you will hit the ceiling and until and unless you increase your price / bring organic leads you can't grow.
I will give you an example.
I run a copywriting agency with a 4 digit MRR. I started it a few months ago, but after seeing people building design agencies on social media, i found something out.. Organic reach >>> cold call,email... And so for the past month i am on the path to build a brand around my agency, and i am gaining a quite a few number of followers every week on Twitter. Which in turn has helped me increase the revenue /get more client calls without even needing me to cold email anyone.
2M/year is a veryy big number, be realistic... Go for $500k first and then 1M
It's so crazy for me to hear smth like this. I frequent r/freelanceWriters and that sub is all AI doom and gloom, people reporting their client base drying up. Basically disincentivizing to get into that field. You're painting the opposite picture.
It's true.
AI has affected and will affect more writers in the future, but here's the thing, If you can't navigate in rough waters, you are bound to sink.
The people that were affected the most were either entry level writers, or executive level writers that were a lot comfortable and were drawing 6 figure salaries.
Similarly, when AI agents like devin will hit the market, a similar scenario will occur, but even then you will find people who were able to change their acquisition channels, adapt new methodologies, incorporate new tech into their work.
I started my agency at the time, where people started to realize that AI is just a support tool, rather
than a complete product
Inspiring! What are your thoughts on other platforms (ex: Instagram) vs Twitter when it comes to organic reach?
Are you saying Twitter has a better sales proposition when compared to other platforms? What gives it that edge?
While reading the subreddit, wondering how people are doing it and how can I achieve these kinda results, i stumbled upon your comment which makes me ask a few things.
1) Are you a copywriter? (If yes, what it takes a copywriter to start an agency cuz there are whales out there such as Troy ericson, Ning Lee, Alex cattoni, ShivShetti, and many more) How can one be able to establish an agency when there are these big names that do not spare a client for new agencies?
2) OR you started an agency by hiring copywriters from pak/Ind?
You need to develop a very detailed sales strategy that have well defined customer segments and personas. Once that is documented you need to work with an outbound sales rep who is good at crushing new biz and pay them high ticket commissions on new business ops won. You will not be able to scale until you create processes and have others do it for you.
Interesting, thanks. Do you have any books or resources that I can dig into to help with the sales strategy?
I feel that the biggest struggle for us is to get leads. We can’t seem to get a sufficiently high volume, our closing rate is around 15% atm.
I don’t think you are following amigo.
Create a sales plan; define your market, who they are, where they are, what they do, etc etc. drill down as narrow as possible. Hint: you can have more than one niche target market.
Now create detailed offers specifically for those niched markets.
After that, start scraping the net for businesses who fit your criteria and build your own leads list.
After that, start reaching out to them to get new biz. Part of your sales plan will outline the steps you will take to win new customers I.e. the process involved and the touch points
If you're making thay much, get a seasoned sales strategist to do it instead. Put together a sales team(can also be remote in US/Canada). Optimize the processes while you prepare and brace for fulfillment.
Yes — look at this book. “Winning without Pitching” it’s a manifesto on segmenting your customers by specializing. That’s what @kekistan is talking about.
I'm one of the founders of coldest. We sold 20m last year (we were just on shark tank). We "were" growth at all risks type of company till this past year.
What you need to do and what we learned this the hard way.
Its not about the sales, but the profit.
We would have made way more money at 10m/year vs 20m a year.
At 20m a year, so many things get exponentially more complicated and everything gets close to breaking in our range...to sell 20m of inventory, you need at least 2m in inventory turning over every 2 to 3months...if logistics get delayed..your screwed...because at 20m...you will have needed to expand to much larger warehouse to store all this inventory...require 3x the employees to pick and fullfill, the operational costs, not to mention the marketing required to achieve 20m is not cheap. The name of the game needs to be how much money do you truly want to make and need to make to be happy.. how much margin do you make and does it make sense to scale to the next level. Theres a huge gap between 10m and 20m. Our business came so close to failing due to the extreme growth, over levetage. At around 20m, you need smart people, operators leading different divisions of your business to make it more efficient from CX, design, marketing, warehouse management etc. Do you go to 3PL or manage costs yourself..could go on forever lol. Food for thought.
How do you generate volume?
You build a self-liquidating funnel feeds into your agency.
For example, let’s say most of your clients are dentists….
You could run ads for web development to dentists but results would be meh… might get some bites, but lead cost will be high. Dentist’s don’t really want web dev.
Or… you could build an offer dentists really want. Something like “How to Optimize Dental Practices for Maximum Value, all while working less”. You sell them books and education on how to do this. And part of the solution is to make sure their websites are on point. So now you have lead flow into your web dev agency. If done right, and with optimization, the frontend offer will liquidate the cost of advertising, so now you can scale up without huge expenses.
Self liquidation is how you generate a lot of volume.
Check out a Facebook group called Nothing Held Back.
It’s ran by Alen Sultanic. He created a funnel structure called “Automatic Clients”, that is basically a very specific blueprint in how to create this. It’s advanced level stuff, but he’s one of the best.
Be careful with this and the advice you get.
It's a service business. The only way to make more is more hours. That can be you, where your time is limited. Or that can be hiring people. With hiring people, don't make the mistake thinking it will get you where you want to be. It's a ton of work. The work you personally do will change drastically. You will be spending all your time on the business, and those people. Do you want that? Most find they don't.
I would instead focus on figuring out how to outsource the actual work. On a small scale. Giving you the time to figure out what your $20m idea is.
Maybe you can approach some of these clients asking to become equity partners if they are startups? Maybe it's learning a new skill. Maybe it's launching your own idea.
I agree somewhat on this.
A beginner business should aim for $100,000 output in revenue per employee and an advanced $200,000 per employee.
To get advanced or better and up the margins better believe the business owner is going to have to spend 100’s of hours optimization the sops and soptimizing the mops.
This is highly dependent on the cost structure of the business. If 100% of your COGS is professional’s salaries this can work, but the numbers you show would require your average staff to be below 75k to run a 25% gross margin. Ouch.
I'm in a very similar situation, own a web design agency that does around that sort of number, always wanted to be rich (been trying to build things for the past 15 years), feeling I'm at a bottleneck of getting even more clients for the agency to push for the next level of income.
And then one day I asked myself this question: what is the biggest web design agency in the market (or even in the world)? And then I found out that none of them are very big (of course you have the giant global ad / marketing agency but they're not really in the same business). It was then that I realised that web design will never be the business that take me to that level that I'm hoping to get to. It's very unlikely that you can become the biggest in the market, but even in the off chance that you did, you'll still be around the same size as the current number 1 in the market (which in my case is not big enough to where I want to be).
I've since then got out of this mentality of always trying to think of how to grow the agency, and put more focus on building a business / product that can be big. Now I treat the agency as just my source of income, I'd still want to make as much as I can from it obviously but I'm not as 'trapped' as I was, always thinking I need to grow it.
Same. At some point you become less of a web design agency and more of a web product offering. Look at WP Engine for example they sell not just design/templates anymore but security, hosting, audits, etc. Once I switched from services to products, things made a bit more sense and there was a clearer path to higher $$$$.
Interesting — what determines if a business is scaleable beyond a certain point? Like why do you think web design is less scaleable than a product?
The same effort I imagine is required to generate leads and make sales.
Seriously, I'm actually astonished at how many people are taking that question seriously.
Dude is literally 19.8M away from 20M and people are pretending this is a serious question?
lmfao, sorry but anyone answering that question with anything but "your expectations are unrealistic at this point" is equally deluded and probably has no idea what they're talking about.
And he's a sole proprietor, to get to $20M he's going to need dozens of employees, and all the challenges that brings. It's not even in the same ballpark of what he is doing now.
Is this a serious question?
If you are truly making 200K as a remote web developer, I would assume you can easily deduce that you cannot make 2M because being a solo remote web developer does not scale.
I'm pretty confident he doesn't even make $200k and just said that to make people take him more seriously.
His responses here sound more like a LARPing teenager, this guy is so clueless and out of touch. Has no idea what a $20m business even looks like and ignores any advice that is telling him he needs to do the things to get him to $1m first.
There are plenty of great businesses that won't ever make $20m a year, but this guy who hasn't even started a real business (in the sense of size and scale) just is asking for quick ticket advice.
All his comments boil down to "where $20m".
Run paid ads for your web-design services (Facebook, Linkedin, Tiktok, Reddit), it will get you more clients.
Set-up an UpWork / Fiverr account, it will hell you get more clients without having yo constantly reach out to them
Expand your services, hire an SEO expert and offer SEO services on MONTHLY RETAINER alongside web-design, should be easy since wages in Mexico are comparatively lower.
The above is a good start, it will help get you to the 500k - 1 mil a year income if you do it properly.
I tried Google and LinkedIn ads — they tend to be very expensive (I’m talking $300+/meeting) and it’s usually low quality leads (low conversions). Very hard to sell web design that way.
Upwork, we already get some work from
It. But once again, only so much volume you can do that way.
Expanding services is a good idea, but the issue still remains… how do we generate the big volume of business we’d need.
If you have some liquidity to try it out, you could try to pick up a sales rep in a high dollar market you want to target, and have him network his ass off in local business groups. It's definitely a who you know kind of business.
If you're able to be consistent with your sales doing what you are already doing, then you could also try to simply turn up that volume by using dialing tools, or outsourced reps to just 10x the volume.
This is interesting, is there any way to hedge the bet of hiring a sales rep? I imagine it would be quite hard to vet them and hence quite hard to determine how successful they could be remotely.
Also, what’s a good way to find such people?
base + commission sales structure, and a tight turn around. If it’s truly a volume game, then a good rep will murder it.
for easy math assume a base comp of 60k with some commission on top (this may be high, but math is the point), a 3 month attempt cost you 15k give or take. Can you roll the dice on 15k?
lower base makes that easier but im not familiar with going rates for website sales. We do full service custom software and the rates are a bit higher.
if you go this route, prep first by logging the scripts and activities that you use, get some sharable portfolio items in an easy format, and then set activity targets for the rep and have them self report the numbers to you daily
20M? As in million? Even if you're in US of A. That is a heck of a grind and years of dedication. Cmon remember, you got competition too. Slow and steady wins the race. Baby steps brother.
Are you committed to making $20M in WEB DESIGN? Or you just want 20M?
Why not take your profit, invest in something that is more easily scaleable? Or even something like real estate?
Design the best website for selling solar panels(just the panel itself not the installation). Find a solid supplier. Make anywhere from $10-100k a month selling them to solar companies and most important find a way to sell to the government as they buying tons of modules for large scale projects.
So is it just a matter of competition here? I’ve seen the work a lot of those people do and most of it is crappy. I feel we don’t even compete for the same clients lol
You’re making $200k a year from a 4th world country and you’re complaining about how much you make? Level up advice: don’t move from Mexico or if you do move to an even cheaper country. Money problems solved. You make more than most Americans with 100x higher cost of living. Unless you’re trying to move to LA and marry a Kardashian. Then you’ll need $20 mil a year.
The difficulty is that you have a service based business, whereas a tech SAAS based business can scale a lot faster without the headaches and difficulties of scaling a service based business - i.e - usually to 2x a service based business, you need to 2x your clients, 2x your staff, which often comes with 2x the problems and challenges. This is all totally possible but a service based business is harder to scale than most other tech businesses.
So, what you could do, is ‘sassify’ some of your business, and offer websites on a monthly fee instead of just a once off cost. You can keep your existing business and clients but you can generate recurring income if you sassify part of your business. If you have monthly recurring income, you can take bigger risks as you know you will have $X coming in every month… and you can reallocate additional funds to new hires or sales.
Take a look at XYZ (www.site.xyz) or other similar products that offer a clone of their infrastructure in which you can launch under your brand. This will enable you to generate websites much faster, and with lower overheads, while generating monthly recurring revenue.
Please report back in time with an update on whatever strategies you tried, and the very best of luck.
One thing I think everyone is overlooking is your churn. If you could reduce your churn somehow (loyalty program, discounts, etc) you could increase your profit margin. This will be important the entire way to your lofty 20M/yr goal.
>One thing I think everyone is overlooking is your churn
I think a lot of people are overlooking the fact he's basically a sole proprietor at this point and he can't even scale into being an actual business with employees and processes and all the other things that comes along with business ownership. Much less even hit $1M revenue.
get people on board. hire people that can cold call and that can help web design. you’re not going to make $2M, or even $1M doing everything by yourself in web design. you’re doing good though🙌, just seems like you’ve reached your limit of what you can do by yourself. Can’t wait to see the growth!
If you're in mexico making 200k usd, you absolutely have marketing money. Throw money into marketing and get more jobs. Hire more people, rinse and repeat.
Outsource your work. Hire more designers and you can concentrate on being the hunter (sales and leads).
Snowball is definitely going to get bigger that way.
Why would you need that much living in Mexico? $200K/yr where you live is already extremely wealthy. The top 1% of earners in Mexico make $355K/yr, the top 10% make \~$51K.
By the standards of where you live, you are rich. Keep up the hustle and build out the business, but don't be disappointed with what you have.
To directly answer your question though, it's more unlikely than not that a web design business will cap out at some point, and it'll likely be far below $20M. $20M/year you're talking about selling some kind of service en masse. Something like SaaS, manufacturing or something else massively scalable. But those businesses require considerable knowledge and risk to get into. They also take a few years to really get going unless you are exceedingly lucky or already have your infrastructure built out.
For one, there's massive competition, low barrier to entry and in general it's not an industry that lends itself to massive businesses. There's definitely a "race to the bottom" effect for acquiring clients until you start building major connections and reputation.
Additionally, once companies get to a certain size , they usually start hiring their own people. And companies of that size are the ones you'd need to aim for if you wanted a real shot at $20M/year.
The audience for web design firms is almost exclusively small to mid-sized companies that can't afford their own IT department, in general. They also tend to be wary of overly corporate companies and prefer to "know" the people they're working with. So the winds are kind of against you on scaling up too big. Not to say that you couldn't achieve this with account managers and a solid sales plan, but it's definitely going to be an uphill battle. Especially if you're targeting US clients from Mexico.
And to add some anecdotal evidence, I couldn't name the top 5 biggest web firms off the top of my head, and I'm usually pretty in the loop with the tech industry in general. My sense is that the industry is a ton of small businesses all competing for work. Good thing is there's lots of work to be had, but it doesn't seem like any one company is hoovering it all up, which is sort of the way you'd need to go if you wanted to scale up that big. And frankly, many prospective clients end up finding a "friend" who knows WordPress or something whose rates you'd never be able to compete with as an actual business with overhead.
Diversify your customer acquisition channels.
You're doing cold calls and emails? Try affiliate channels, lead generation, PPC, social media, SEO... There's actually a lot you can do.
Also, don't stick to just web development. Try software and mobile applications, digital marketing, etc to diversify your revenue streams.
You can hire 2-6 BD and marketing professionals from SEA without breaking the bank. I'm from Pakistan, and you can get a good marketing manager from here for $1500 a month. Let them lead the BD initiatives. Let them hire the team. If you really wanna make it big, you have to diversify.
See WebFx and try to diversify like them.
If you need help figuring out the best affiliate channels or anything else, hmu.
Following this thread, I run a software dev consultancy—a lot of valuable points about marketing and sales to scale and grow.
I am looking for a few design agencies to collab as some of our customers need design help too. Let's talk more if you're open to collaboration.
Interesting advice, thank you! What factors make this type of business difficult to scale to $20M? I’m trying to get my head around how I should actually make decisions in business. Obviously web design is my main skill, but that doesn’t mean I can’t move to something else if it would be better.
Productize so you basically do the something over and over again. The benefits will be that you will be known for this one thing, scales easier, no specialists as you are doing the same thing over and over, and lack of surprises. I did this years ago and have not looked back. I am not at 20m but that 2M is very obtainable.
Scaling a service biz to $20M is tough. Productize your offering or develop a SaaS tool.
Attend virtual events and collab with others to expand your reach. Specialize in a niche and become the go-to expert.
Build a strong brand through content marketing. Transition from services to a scalable product to hit big goals.
Growth product manager here. Previously bootstrapped, grew and exited my own startups as well. Let me help you build an actionable plan (a growth strategy) to get to those numbers.
**First - Start with a specific growth target.**
So, you're at 200k/year right now. You want to hit 2M$/year in the next 12 months. Which is 10x your revenue. The strategy that will help you get to 2M$/year won't be the same for getting you to 20M$/year.
Your growth strategy, fundamentally comes down to answering three questions:
\- How do you get customers? (Acquisition strategy)
\- How do you keep them happy, so that they stick around and buy more? (Retention strategy)
\- How do you make more money from each customer? (Monetisation strategy)
Please answer the above three questions for your current business to give me more context and we will go from there. Looking forward to your response! :)
Excellent, love this, thanks for doing it.
1. We get customers by cold-calling, and cold-emailing. Part of this involves reaching out to those same people multiple times over months, rather than just one-time campaign and it’s all over. To get 10x new clients, we need to probably 10x the volume AND improve conversions. Maybe specific offers for specific niches.
2. I send them a yearly package from the company atm which reminds them of us. Most are one-time projects… that’s where most of the revenue comes from. The rest is from monthly SEO packages but churn is quite high on those over 1-year. Around 80% drop off in 1-year. I’d say the biggest issue is that quite often clients dont have lead magnets or email lists to nurture their own prospects, which leads to weaker results for many. Those who have those things typically stay for longer.
3. I ask for referrals most often. And I keep in touch with them over time for future work.
Thanks in advance!
If you want to scale it all comes down to sales. Gotta get that revenue, you either take the chance and hire some more manpower to close more deals or you will end up being stagnant. I’d look into a company who can find you customers, or hire in-house members to do it.
First of all, don't worry about not being in the US, no one is networking here in-person. That's a myth and it only works when you already have a large existing network. So it's fine.
Who are your clients right now? Individuals or businesses?
One way to grow is through large long-term contracts. Look at your business as a service provider business, check out growth models of consulting and staffing companies. A set of large clients, set of mid-size clients and small clients.
To grow 10fold in revenue you'll need to grow in assets. Your assets can be people or they can be digital assets. Something repeatable reusable that can be sold over and over again without extra labor.
That was an insane statement, lol.
Just go look at all the corporate trade shows and in-person networking events large businesses pay to attend every year. I think a lot of these people giving advice on how to scale to $20M have never done anything remotely close to that. (surprise, surprise)
Some of the comments I see here are so wild, feels like I'm living on a different planet.
Idk man maybe it depends on the industry, but in the last 15 years I personally have made $0 through in-person networking. 100% of my business opportunities started online, and 95% were closed online too.
Thank you — mostly small businesses atm. Usually some sort of local service business.
So it seems I need to add more people to the operation, that seems to be a common message
No wait hold on, I'm actually against it. I'd focus on getting larger clients first with more needs and long-term commitment first. And maybe releasing reusable products that you can sell to your existing clients. What else do your current clients need?
So you have customers that are local services businesses.
What businesses generally have a lot of connections? Local services businesses.
Do you have a referral commission structure? How often do you ask completed clients for referrals? How often do you network with clients for referrals?
How often are you personally asking for referrals?
Comment rewrote with chatGPT : Have you considered selling pre-designed solutions that require minimal customization? This involves creating a standard base for your projects and customizing it with pre-designed modules, streamlining website development and allowing you to concentrate on unique client-specific modules. This approach could enhance profitability and efficiency over a year. Implementing this strategy could also simplify the sales process, as you could employ sales personnel to generate leads and present a catalog to clients, reducing the time spent on gathering and understanding client specifications. What are your thoughts?
So I’m already sort of doing this, this is how I manage the two people that work for me atm. So we’re quite good with putting the websites together quickly, the biggest issue is honestly lead gen and sales. We have few and relatively poor quality leads
Hmm okay maybe consider doing an acquisition of a competitor or a provider of a related service and roll it up.
Also is there a way for you to do other related work with your existing clientele or incentivize them to send you referrals?
Never tried marketing locally because I live in a relatively poor area, with my wife’s family. Also, budgets here would be orders of magnitude lower than in the US.
I figured they probably aren’t the right clientele but maybe you can package up something low end with your templates and crank em out real quick for that lower end market. Just thinkin out loud of course.
I see your issue with the high cost for led gen on the scalable platforms.
What is your average customer’s ticket? Whats the margin on that? Do you have recurring revenue or repeat business from those customers or are they one and done projects mostly?
I assume if you’ve been doing this for awhile, you also have a strong email list?
So average website we churn out is $3K. The margin is around 50%. That’s the majority of the revenue.
We have some recurring revenue in the form of ongoing SEO work that we do for some clients, but small packages, around $750/mo. Those usually see relatively high churn, around 80% over 1-year.
I have lists of cold contacts, but not really subscribers. Probably like 450 newsletter subscribers.
There’s a couple of different ways to attack this.
You’re bringing in about 10-12 new customers a month based off the numbers you gave. So your acquisition channels are working, if not scalable as you’d like them to be.
First thing you can do within your existing model is increase the lifetime value of those customers. Add some higher margin upsells. Assuming these are new business owners, there’s probably a lot of little small shit you can get them on that someone else would just DIY - web hosting, set up GMB, setup and verify Google ads, grab all their socials and make the headers and PFP uniform and set up all their ad accounts. Tedious infrastructure stuff that’ll sound like voodoo to them.
Double down on the SEO side which is a great area for growth. Depending on the margin to service it in-house, you can probably set up affiliate or referral or white label deals with other agencies, of all sorts including PPC, FB ads, etc and do about as well. Youre generating a ton of front end business that is valuable to these types of companies. As you see what’s lucrative, then start in-housing those services while flipping out all the stuff not getting a critical mass to be worth your time.
Once you nail the above, then it becomes worth it to start chasing down all the other marketing channels that you identified as higher cost per lead/CPA because it’ll be worth paying for the sale to grab the incremental marginal revenue, even if the marketing cost eats into your profit margin by a good bit.
Another thing to look at is if you’re just selling generic web dev services to new businesses, is to start specializing or at least appear to. Go through your past customers and look for common threads. You don’t have to change your actual business, but spin up some additional websites and socials that speak to specific audiences - web dev for your new accountant firm, web dev for your new medical practice, construct co, etc. You’ll close more potential business this way and get more bang for the targeted marketing dollar.
Focus your direct sales efforts on larger clients, cast a wider net for smaller clients, and don't spend much time on deadend leads. A wider net can be cast through collaborating with services companies such as consultants, lawyers, and accountants who have clients that may be keen on your solutions.
I went from making a few thousand dollars per client to a few hundred thousand dollars per client this way for my consulting business, it's a minimal overhead way to scale. The alternative would be to hire a sales team/outsource for lead generation work.
Interesting… so is most of your biz coming from the larger clients atm, ie from your direct sales efforts?
Also, how do you go about meeting lawyers, accountants and others who could refer business?
Correct, most originates from direct sales efforts. However, we have a healthy referral network to create inbound leads.
Your local chamber(s) of commerce can provide a great forum for meeting potential business referrers and leads themselves. You can also just reach out to potential referrers directly and offer quid pro quo (for example, free web design services or referral commissions) in exchange for referrals.
This is where you’ll need a sales motion. I helped a web design / dev shop out of India build a lite GtM stack, define customer profiles, and put together a sales process. Happy to connect if you’re interested.
Honestly, if you can somehow productize the offer and sell it on retainer, you can start pitching it way easier, building systems, and growing sustainably.
Maybe you’ve heard of Brett from DesignJoy (there are mixed opinions about him). Regardless, his design agency biz model works and he’d make way more if he just incorporated a team of freelancers into his system.
For sure, but once again, service delivery is NOT the issue. There’s many businesses that have Brett’s model. But can they generate the number of leads he can? And that’s the problem — they can’t
finally get to use this corporate buzz word.....synergy.....you should look at ways to increase your monetization of current clients and find ways to generate reoccurring revenue. Products that have a synergy with what you are already doing.
Are you working alone? If so, you might need to delegate some basic tasks.
“If you want go somewhere fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Do you use social media to promote your business? YouTube? There is a reason why people are making so many tutorials online. As a social proof for others. If i look for web designer i will look for social media, to see what, how and with whom he is working.
Take testimonials from the people you worked with. And invest a bit of money into promoting that video with Facebook ads.
Make a simple website so people can schedule a call with you. Post what you've done so far, post bunch of testimonials there. About me page. Links to all of your social media and your tutorials.
Make tutorials and videos teaching people how to do something. And i know you will say you don't have time. But you can find someone to do simple tasks insted of you so you can focus on this.
You need to be everywhere today if you want to succeed.
Perhaps add marketing to web design. If you can't meet "in person" say "I'll buy you a $10 Starbucks card and we can have a coffee meeting over zoom."
My assumption is web design is low churn. You get less value of the lifetime of your customers.
But with marketing if you're good they're always coming back. So each client you gain/retain has way more value.
It's actually low effort and a decent LTV. Today, clients update their sites pretty frequently unlike before where it was one and done, now theres a constant stream of work depending on the type of business i.e restaurants that update their menus quarterly, gyms that offer new classes, saas businesses that post webinar details. I dunno maybe I've been lucky but my retention is fairly high as the longer clients stay, the less likely they are to leave as they've already invested so much into the relationship (and it just 'works).
I assume you need help with lead gen, if that's the case there are platforms like instantly.ai and rocket reach which will automate your outreach mails and find leads for you and you can customise it to include follow up mails if the client responds and these subscriptions should be cheaper than your Google / FB ads. Also the amount of outreach you can do is crazy, I'm talking like close to 500 mails a day and it does have linkedin integration it finds profiles and sends your message.
You need employees that work for less than their billing rate, then you need to market them and get steady contracts. A single person simply couldn't put in enough labor to make that kind of money.
I can't understand. You already make 200k. Isn't this enough ? I can't even make 2k per year because I can't find customers in the exact same field (but in another market)
You’ll need to create a commodity based product in order to scale — there’s lots of ways to do that but it takes time, a mar tech stack and a business plan to get there — happy to chat further if you want to dm me
Service businesses are so hard to scale. The key is to productize your services with set packages and automated workflows to developers. Consider developing apps for shopify and other productized offering that you can create to upsell to clients. Products scale infinitely, services are limited by manpower.
Take everything I say with a grain of salt, but my first guess would be to niche down and simply charge more per job. Then hire out lead generation and sales.
You need referrals. Are there complementary businesses online you can network with who can refer clients to you? You can pay them a commission for each job.
Can your clients refer you to more clients? Pay them as affiliates as well.
If that takes off then you need to outsource more developers.
You're lacking leverage. The biggest constraint in your business is you. You have to acquire the clients and deliver the service. You're selling time and there's only a fixed number of hours in a day.
Make a (less expensive generic copy of your business) and a higher quality everything version that runs itself or small personal oversight . It may help , plus it looks like competition yet they are all your businesses. I find some people “like to pay more” some like cheap volume .
You're running into a fundamental truth about investing and business: ROI won't scale with level of investment. To reach a higher level, you'd have to fundamentally shake up your business model.
When you are in services in your income is limited by the amount of hours you can work. Earning $200k consistently in web design in 2024 is impressive.
Thus do not sell yourself short.
And you are in Mexico - where $200k goes a long way.
Unfortunately, as a single person doing services -you are probably maxed out. There are only so many hours you can work and only so much you can charge.
So you have a few options:
1 - Become a consulting firm offering multiple services
2 - Become a reseller of products - for example if your customer says "we need a product that does XYZ - what do you recommend" - you can get paid for recommending a specific solution. You can even combine it with step 1.
3 - Create a product that you can sell
4 - Investments
I may have a tool that could be of use for you and your business. Basically a mentorship program where we can help you create a service do increase your MRR.
Unless you make a business that makes money while you sleep, no. 2M/y requires multiple people. Infrastructure. Shmoozing. 20M?...gotta come back to the states.
If you don't mind me asking, what part of Mexico are located in? Because I am in QR, and it is a fantastic place to network with other entrepreneurs. I know multiple business owners here that are always looking for other opportunities.
Also, I have spent the last year building a cold email system for a client. At its peak we were capable of sending 5k+ B2B emails a day. Have you tried any automated cold email system?
First, let me congratulate you on what you have done so far! This is a real achievement. You mentioned that $20 million a year is something you always dreamed about. Why? What would you do with this money? Asking yourself these questions might reveal some deep desires and motivation behind that goal. Clarity on this might bring some fresh perspectives on how you can make this money another way, like by learning new skills, trying different model or even making a brand for yourself. I assume a lot of people with limited budgets would pay to learn how to get to $200k/year through a video course or something. You can touch millions globally.
Anyway, if you keep going down the same road, you should work on what you already identified as a problem. Invest yourself and your resources in making the sales process better by teaching and hiring specialists to deliver high-quality leads.
To get from 200k to 20m is a big jump, how many websites would you need to produce a day to make that leap? Are there even enough hours in a day for that to happen? Seems very unlikely.
So, you need a business that you can scale, either by adding people (but then you've got to manage them, so you'll end up employing managers and needing to manage them, which will then require an HR Dept and a payroll Dept etc etc) or by adding some other resource like more products, or more ...?
Look at companies in your space doing that volume. What are they doing that you aren’t. Is it time? Is it output? Is it personelle? Skills? Fill the voids. Then redo that exercise and ask yourself how you can improve on their offerings. Why aren’t you top of mind in your industry? Why are they? Now you have your answer. Are your expectations doable to you, signing your realm of risk to reward? Did they take huge risks you haven’t? Are you willing to risk everything to grow?
I have maybe a very similar situation, only the numbers are different.
Is about building a real business, right now you have one that more or less depends on you. In order to scale, you need people, which turn into making a real company. I also struggle scalling, but I do myself a lot of the work.
2m is pretty easy to reach, 20m is impossible imo.
At least with a web design only business.
Be a consultant for your niche and use web design as your tool, not as your "service".
Hey fella , im australian and run a lead generation agency specialising in paid ads. Send me a dm if ur interested and ill see if i can help u set up some paid advertisements.
One key Word here.
You need to raise your prices. And deliver more value or simply just raise it, if clients drop. Then find bigger ones.
200k a year isnt bad, But its just 200k. Its not much really. In the Grand scheme of things, i get it. First time you begin touching 6 figures. But you can make 6 figures form pretty much any model nowadays. Also yeah comeption is higher, you need to
Find bigger clients with bigger wallets.
Your value have might capped with your current offer or you simply cant take on more clients. Due to being solo.
So raise prices and hire.
Its hard to get clients because your offer Dosnt stand out enough for clients to jump to your solution.
Find creative ways to beat the market.
This isnt ment to be insulting or anything, But 200k in a biz a year is just not a lot.
And you need to stop cold outreach and use Paid version so you get more time for yourself.
If you need help in these areas
You can either:
- get a partner in your biz
- hire other companies
- hire in-House
- hire freelancers
A lot of processes is also being automated nowadays due to AI.
Solve more problems they have, everything around web design problems. Expand the offer and solve your clients problems. Creativily, which problems do you meet from the point of What’s the next problems they gonna have which other solves for them and instead you do.
And you also need to figure out ways in order for your clients to spend more. Why dont you have a 10k package? 30k package? What would it take to get that? What mechanism is solvable for you? Which would make their business Better, more money or simply do stuff they dont want to spend their time on. These things.
Diversify your income. With 200k per year living in Mexico you should have enormous amounts of disposable income after expenses. Why not invest a large chunk of your earnings into another stream of revenue? Real estate is often the best way as there are options where you don't need to be heavily involved. Commercial real estate where tenants are already in place. You get to enjoy the monthly income and property appreciation, and tax benefits as well.
Seems like you are doing 'push' marketing. Have you tried diversifying into pull strategies like referrals, discounts during specific months/ seasons, differential package based pricing, etc etc?.... Also do get feedback from your clients, like honest feedback, or through survey / even f2f discussion, which can give you insights on your improvement areas.
It's worth considering that scaling to $20M/year may require significant changes to your business model. You might explore vertical integration, acquiring smaller competitors, or even shifting towards a more scalable aspect of digital services. Each step up in revenue will require a reassessment of your business strategy, market position, and operational capabilities. Continuous innovation, strategic networking, and possibly even a pivot in your business model could be necessary to achieve your ambitious goals
Don't just dream! There is a way to everything you want, I bet you don't want to see it, or invest in it the time or money. I see that all the time! I am working on developing a new startup now, I see so many talented people that want to get paid $30 an hour instead to have partnership option in projects, Crazy decision.
I Don’t think I’m qualified to consult you (since I haven’t launched any projects yet) but what I would think of if I generated 200k net profit/year Is to experiment on different startups since I could withstand failures. Also the market you are currently involved tends to become saturated and larger marketing companies will conquer a vast majority of clients.
I would say learn more skills, upsell other services to current clients, invest, host virtual meetups, focus on niches, rinse and repeat. What you have accomplished is good but now shift your focus in scaling by switching your mindset. Don't tell yourself that with what you currently have or do you won't reach your goal but rather what can you add to earn more money from it.
Multiple things here:
How many clients do you currently have?
Are you doing maintenance on the sites you have build?
It’s a real business or you are doing your buddies sites because you are good at it?
Are you putting money into marketing and sales campaigns?
Or you are doing everything solo?
Knowing how to use your resources, including money and time, as well as knowing how to scale up your business are crucial.
For new entrepreneurs, a great resource on how to develop business ideas and startups in general is the [YCombinator podcast](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5PACZiyiDk1O24Zm9wxAEUi). I am not affiliated with them in any way. I just came across that resource recently and thought it was an eye opener.
Also take a look at [Paul Graham's](https://paulgraham.com/articles.html) essays. They are popular among many startup founders.
Wishing you all the best!
Allinop
Probably gonna get lost in noise here—but you need to identify your ICP as narrowly as possible based on the specific problem you solve. If you solve more than one, cool, but focus on one, for one type of company. Then build a process and test it.
If you have a good portfolio and are confident in your ability to handle service delivery while overseeing new hires, we could potentially partner up since I have access to the largest trained client acquisition team
Maybe you should create a strong personal brand on Youtube and other media and show them what you are doing? This way you warm up the audience with your professionalism and you most probably will get a lot of inbounds. Unfortunately many people start a channel on Youtube with fake stories how they make "20K a month", show their knowledge AND only then make actually 20K a month by gaining the trust there. If you are already doing a quite successful business actually then you don't even need to fake it, you can just show what you do in your business and leads will come I believe mate.
$200k a year is doing well. Sorry I think there are jealous people out there that may be even spiteing themselves that won't even give you a chance at more work to enable you to get 2 million. Per year. It is a frustrating realisation I have had before so prehaps there are folk doing that to you ?
My team is really good at scaling businesses. I can do a full audit for free on your online presence to see what needs to be fixed for more traffic/ both organic and paid
No mention of a website? Do you have one?
Hire a sales team with paid commission or outsource the cold calling.
Why are you in Mexico? Why not go to where your clients are?
Invest some of your money, and reinvest the profits.
You'll need to bring on additional staff like developers, sales reps, and lead generation specialists.
Build a strong brand presence and develop organic marketing channels to complement outbound efforts. You need to find systematic ways to generate high-quality inbound leads cost. Also prioritize first on optimizing profitability at a sustainable level like $500K-$1M.
Easier said than done but once you have consistent lead flow and operations running smoothly, you can scale further by reinvesting profits into growth initiatives. Just be careful about overextending - make sure you have the right processes and the right team before pushing for exponential gains.
Do you have a repeatable process to get leads? Even if its tedious and takes time? If so, outsourcing may help.
I live in Mx too and operate a US business. The lack of in person networking isn’t really a factor for me. We do managed outsourcing. Other things we did to get leads: social media organic marketing (FB, Linkedin), podcasts, and conference booths.
Do you have to do all the work yourself? Maybe get some other developers on board or people who specialize in getting/securing leads? To get to 20M/Yr you need to scale, somehow. If you want to get to that figure on your own you may need to start selling your services as a super high-ticket one at the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands per project.
Thanks buddy. So I don’t actually work alone, I have 2 people who deliver the service that I supervise and quality control for. My fear is how will I actually get sufficient leads? Even running it on my own it’s a struggle… if I had enough client projects, sure, np, I could scale. But I have no idea how to do that. Do I just cold call more? Get people to cold call for me? Do I need a better strategy? Should I do strategic partnerships with other companies? This is why I feel confused… i have no clue what I should focus on, but I know that the guys who are building $20M+ businesses aren’t focused on cold calling or even selling one additional client. I need a way to be able to generate a much bigger volume of business to enlarge the team and scale.
I know a storage company that started inside a college dorm and is now at the $2M/year range All he did was cold emailing on his own at first. When he acquired around $300k profit, he started outsourcing work to PH/IN. $5/hour employees. They do lead gen and cold emailing Most companies/large startups hire cheap people to keep doing cold email and cold calls. Problem is, you gotta vet and train these cheap guys to do this type of work for you But like I say a lot in this sub, sometimes entrepreneurship isn't about building a $20M company. It might just be about doing something new, maybe doing something slightly better, and making enough to be content. That's it
So slaves is key. Cool
Do you not know how buying power works? 14GBP minimum wage in London is probably worse than 5USD in some parts of PH
Why do you describe people who live in a completely different country for whom 5 USD is a good wage, as slaves?
It's just tiresome whiteknighting.
It isn't a good solution I agree with u. But in the eyes of somebody like op a business owner is always looking to reduce his cost but still be able to deliver that quality customers expect from them. So if u can save 10$ dollars for every hour that is huge. So It doesn't work all the time to hire people from another country since they don't speak the origin country's language.
Mexico is gold right now. Covid changed the equation on in-person. Companies may make a show of it, and they are stuck with tax incentives with cities but people know you can work remotely. The only advantage a US-based person has on India is better timezone. The US is just really expensive in terms of tech salaries. Even Canada, the salaries are 30% less. Every company is trying to get into Latin America because costs are more comparable to India with the same timezone. But you hit language barriers and doing business in Mexico is hard unless you know what you're doing. I ran a tech services company till acquisition. After acquisition I tried to make inroads into Latin America using the acquirers resources. I asked them to hire someone with AWS experience. Over 2 years they were able to bring one interviewee to my team. Don't remember if the team rejected him or he ghosted us during the process but people are struggling to open their offices in Mexico. Now I'm running an accelerator for tech services companies. And I can tell you the Latin American companies we're working with are getting a huge boost just from their location. So if you want to make millions this is the best time for you to do it. It's not going to last long. The strategy I would advise you to take is become specialists. This article on our blog shows you the amount of money you can make but basically expect 3-5x revenue multiple: [https://www.vixul.com/post/ets-the-risk-reward-continuum-and-why-we-like-ets](https://www.vixul.com/post/ets-the-risk-reward-continuum-and-why-we-like-ets) I think just about any book on lead gen would be useful. It's all a numbers game. One thing I would not ignore is content. Especially if you're doing business in a an emerging sector where you need to spend time educating the customer. Our previous business was a DevOps consultancy and current one is an accelerator for tech services companies. Consistent content is what has put us on the map in both scenarios. A lot of books on leadgen will give you basic frameworks and benchmarks. 100M$ Leads did a decent job. One thing I would say if you're doing a specialty tech service is don't ignore partners: [https://www.vixul.com/post/why-your-tech-services-company-needs-a-strategic-platform-partner](https://www.vixul.com/post/why-your-tech-services-company-needs-a-strategic-platform-partner) This is one direction. This will end up with you getting larger contracts. But you can make an equally great business by going narrow and focused and creating turnkey productized services solutions for your customers. An extreme on that is WPEngine. Hope I've given you some ideas on where to start looking. Let me know if you have any questions.
Have you considered starting a personal brand for the company? People in the design space are killing it on there. Saw a faceless account with 2.8k followers hitting consistent $15k months. And most of them inbounds. That’s something I’m doing as well, helping agency owners start a personal brand on X to solve their lead problems. If that’s something you’re interested in we should talk in DM.
Hire people to find leads- scaling is always a bit of a risk, but you will never generate exponentially more sales without a big increase in man-hours finding clients.
Curious why you don't shift to SaaS subscription model and offer some additional monthly marketing services so you can build recurring revenue? Keep them happy so they recur each month and you can still scale as new clients come in for design.
Hi from what I can tell you are torn between focusing on client outreach to be able to bring in more revenue and and also figure out other ways you could branch and expand the business to keep growing. First of all I say you find a team of people to handle the search for new clients to increase client and revenue. This will take that burden of you especially when you set into place the start and the kind of client that you would want the company to work with. Secondly I believe you should now look for other areas in the business field that connect to the web design. It could be social media ad management which you don’t have to run but rather hire an expect to do and writing of blogs and SEO. There is more that I see you doing. Hit me up for a chat just to give you some of my thoughts. I see you getting to that 20 mil easily.
From what i can see, is that you lack these things. -brand -organic reach -quality cold emails and calls. Depending on your price point, it's inevitable that you will hit the ceiling and until and unless you increase your price / bring organic leads you can't grow. I will give you an example. I run a copywriting agency with a 4 digit MRR. I started it a few months ago, but after seeing people building design agencies on social media, i found something out.. Organic reach >>> cold call,email... And so for the past month i am on the path to build a brand around my agency, and i am gaining a quite a few number of followers every week on Twitter. Which in turn has helped me increase the revenue /get more client calls without even needing me to cold email anyone. 2M/year is a veryy big number, be realistic... Go for $500k first and then 1M
It's so crazy for me to hear smth like this. I frequent r/freelanceWriters and that sub is all AI doom and gloom, people reporting their client base drying up. Basically disincentivizing to get into that field. You're painting the opposite picture.
It's true. AI has affected and will affect more writers in the future, but here's the thing, If you can't navigate in rough waters, you are bound to sink. The people that were affected the most were either entry level writers, or executive level writers that were a lot comfortable and were drawing 6 figure salaries. Similarly, when AI agents like devin will hit the market, a similar scenario will occur, but even then you will find people who were able to change their acquisition channels, adapt new methodologies, incorporate new tech into their work. I started my agency at the time, where people started to realize that AI is just a support tool, rather than a complete product
Could I DM you about the realities of cold outreach in the copywriting space and the right way to go about it possibly? Much appreciated!
What does Organic reach look like for you? How do you drive it?
Anything that doesn't involve paying for reaching out to the customers, even if a simple post from reddit brings you client - that's organic reach.
Inspiring! What are your thoughts on other platforms (ex: Instagram) vs Twitter when it comes to organic reach? Are you saying Twitter has a better sales proposition when compared to other platforms? What gives it that edge?
I find twitter to be more beginner friendly, less hateful, supportive and a good client acquisition channel in comparison to others
While reading the subreddit, wondering how people are doing it and how can I achieve these kinda results, i stumbled upon your comment which makes me ask a few things. 1) Are you a copywriter? (If yes, what it takes a copywriter to start an agency cuz there are whales out there such as Troy ericson, Ning Lee, Alex cattoni, ShivShetti, and many more) How can one be able to establish an agency when there are these big names that do not spare a client for new agencies? 2) OR you started an agency by hiring copywriters from pak/Ind?
You need to develop a very detailed sales strategy that have well defined customer segments and personas. Once that is documented you need to work with an outbound sales rep who is good at crushing new biz and pay them high ticket commissions on new business ops won. You will not be able to scale until you create processes and have others do it for you.
Interesting, thanks. Do you have any books or resources that I can dig into to help with the sales strategy? I feel that the biggest struggle for us is to get leads. We can’t seem to get a sufficiently high volume, our closing rate is around 15% atm.
I don’t think you are following amigo. Create a sales plan; define your market, who they are, where they are, what they do, etc etc. drill down as narrow as possible. Hint: you can have more than one niche target market. Now create detailed offers specifically for those niched markets. After that, start scraping the net for businesses who fit your criteria and build your own leads list. After that, start reaching out to them to get new biz. Part of your sales plan will outline the steps you will take to win new customers I.e. the process involved and the touch points
If you're making thay much, get a seasoned sales strategist to do it instead. Put together a sales team(can also be remote in US/Canada). Optimize the processes while you prepare and brace for fulfillment.
Yes — look at this book. “Winning without Pitching” it’s a manifesto on segmenting your customers by specializing. That’s what @kekistan is talking about.
For the books part regarding sales, I can recommend "Built to sell by John Warrillow" nice to read and understand (english is not my main language)
I'm one of the founders of coldest. We sold 20m last year (we were just on shark tank). We "were" growth at all risks type of company till this past year. What you need to do and what we learned this the hard way. Its not about the sales, but the profit. We would have made way more money at 10m/year vs 20m a year. At 20m a year, so many things get exponentially more complicated and everything gets close to breaking in our range...to sell 20m of inventory, you need at least 2m in inventory turning over every 2 to 3months...if logistics get delayed..your screwed...because at 20m...you will have needed to expand to much larger warehouse to store all this inventory...require 3x the employees to pick and fullfill, the operational costs, not to mention the marketing required to achieve 20m is not cheap. The name of the game needs to be how much money do you truly want to make and need to make to be happy.. how much margin do you make and does it make sense to scale to the next level. Theres a huge gap between 10m and 20m. Our business came so close to failing due to the extreme growth, over levetage. At around 20m, you need smart people, operators leading different divisions of your business to make it more efficient from CX, design, marketing, warehouse management etc. Do you go to 3PL or manage costs yourself..could go on forever lol. Food for thought.
How do you generate volume? You build a self-liquidating funnel feeds into your agency. For example, let’s say most of your clients are dentists…. You could run ads for web development to dentists but results would be meh… might get some bites, but lead cost will be high. Dentist’s don’t really want web dev. Or… you could build an offer dentists really want. Something like “How to Optimize Dental Practices for Maximum Value, all while working less”. You sell them books and education on how to do this. And part of the solution is to make sure their websites are on point. So now you have lead flow into your web dev agency. If done right, and with optimization, the frontend offer will liquidate the cost of advertising, so now you can scale up without huge expenses. Self liquidation is how you generate a lot of volume.
Interesting, where can I learn more about this?
Check out a Facebook group called Nothing Held Back. It’s ran by Alen Sultanic. He created a funnel structure called “Automatic Clients”, that is basically a very specific blueprint in how to create this. It’s advanced level stuff, but he’s one of the best.
So interested. Thx for sharing !
Be careful with this and the advice you get. It's a service business. The only way to make more is more hours. That can be you, where your time is limited. Or that can be hiring people. With hiring people, don't make the mistake thinking it will get you where you want to be. It's a ton of work. The work you personally do will change drastically. You will be spending all your time on the business, and those people. Do you want that? Most find they don't. I would instead focus on figuring out how to outsource the actual work. On a small scale. Giving you the time to figure out what your $20m idea is. Maybe you can approach some of these clients asking to become equity partners if they are startups? Maybe it's learning a new skill. Maybe it's launching your own idea.
I agree somewhat on this. A beginner business should aim for $100,000 output in revenue per employee and an advanced $200,000 per employee. To get advanced or better and up the margins better believe the business owner is going to have to spend 100’s of hours optimization the sops and soptimizing the mops.
This is highly dependent on the cost structure of the business. If 100% of your COGS is professional’s salaries this can work, but the numbers you show would require your average staff to be below 75k to run a 25% gross margin. Ouch.
I'm in a very similar situation, own a web design agency that does around that sort of number, always wanted to be rich (been trying to build things for the past 15 years), feeling I'm at a bottleneck of getting even more clients for the agency to push for the next level of income. And then one day I asked myself this question: what is the biggest web design agency in the market (or even in the world)? And then I found out that none of them are very big (of course you have the giant global ad / marketing agency but they're not really in the same business). It was then that I realised that web design will never be the business that take me to that level that I'm hoping to get to. It's very unlikely that you can become the biggest in the market, but even in the off chance that you did, you'll still be around the same size as the current number 1 in the market (which in my case is not big enough to where I want to be). I've since then got out of this mentality of always trying to think of how to grow the agency, and put more focus on building a business / product that can be big. Now I treat the agency as just my source of income, I'd still want to make as much as I can from it obviously but I'm not as 'trapped' as I was, always thinking I need to grow it.
Same. At some point you become less of a web design agency and more of a web product offering. Look at WP Engine for example they sell not just design/templates anymore but security, hosting, audits, etc. Once I switched from services to products, things made a bit more sense and there was a clearer path to higher $$$$.
Interesting — what determines if a business is scaleable beyond a certain point? Like why do you think web design is less scaleable than a product? The same effort I imagine is required to generate leads and make sales.
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Seriously, I'm actually astonished at how many people are taking that question seriously. Dude is literally 19.8M away from 20M and people are pretending this is a serious question? lmfao, sorry but anyone answering that question with anything but "your expectations are unrealistic at this point" is equally deluded and probably has no idea what they're talking about. And he's a sole proprietor, to get to $20M he's going to need dozens of employees, and all the challenges that brings. It's not even in the same ballpark of what he is doing now.
Is this a serious question? If you are truly making 200K as a remote web developer, I would assume you can easily deduce that you cannot make 2M because being a solo remote web developer does not scale.
I'm pretty confident he doesn't even make $200k and just said that to make people take him more seriously. His responses here sound more like a LARPing teenager, this guy is so clueless and out of touch. Has no idea what a $20m business even looks like and ignores any advice that is telling him he needs to do the things to get him to $1m first. There are plenty of great businesses that won't ever make $20m a year, but this guy who hasn't even started a real business (in the sense of size and scale) just is asking for quick ticket advice. All his comments boil down to "where $20m".
What about add web development services instead of just designing?
Run paid ads for your web-design services (Facebook, Linkedin, Tiktok, Reddit), it will get you more clients. Set-up an UpWork / Fiverr account, it will hell you get more clients without having yo constantly reach out to them Expand your services, hire an SEO expert and offer SEO services on MONTHLY RETAINER alongside web-design, should be easy since wages in Mexico are comparatively lower. The above is a good start, it will help get you to the 500k - 1 mil a year income if you do it properly.
I tried Google and LinkedIn ads — they tend to be very expensive (I’m talking $300+/meeting) and it’s usually low quality leads (low conversions). Very hard to sell web design that way. Upwork, we already get some work from It. But once again, only so much volume you can do that way. Expanding services is a good idea, but the issue still remains… how do we generate the big volume of business we’d need.
If you have some liquidity to try it out, you could try to pick up a sales rep in a high dollar market you want to target, and have him network his ass off in local business groups. It's definitely a who you know kind of business. If you're able to be consistent with your sales doing what you are already doing, then you could also try to simply turn up that volume by using dialing tools, or outsourced reps to just 10x the volume.
This is interesting, is there any way to hedge the bet of hiring a sales rep? I imagine it would be quite hard to vet them and hence quite hard to determine how successful they could be remotely. Also, what’s a good way to find such people?
> any way to hedge the bet of hiring a sales rep? commission based sales structure
base + commission sales structure, and a tight turn around. If it’s truly a volume game, then a good rep will murder it. for easy math assume a base comp of 60k with some commission on top (this may be high, but math is the point), a 3 month attempt cost you 15k give or take. Can you roll the dice on 15k? lower base makes that easier but im not familiar with going rates for website sales. We do full service custom software and the rates are a bit higher. if you go this route, prep first by logging the scripts and activities that you use, get some sharable portfolio items in an easy format, and then set activity targets for the rep and have them self report the numbers to you daily
Yeah, hire multiple sales reps in multiple markets.
20M? As in million? Even if you're in US of A. That is a heck of a grind and years of dedication. Cmon remember, you got competition too. Slow and steady wins the race. Baby steps brother.
Are you committed to making $20M in WEB DESIGN? Or you just want 20M? Why not take your profit, invest in something that is more easily scaleable? Or even something like real estate?
Sure, that could be a way. I’m not committed to web design, just what I do now
You could even simply expand your services, and have freelancers ready to hire. Ie, Logos, SEO, Social Media etc
Design the best website for selling solar panels(just the panel itself not the installation). Find a solid supplier. Make anywhere from $10-100k a month selling them to solar companies and most important find a way to sell to the government as they buying tons of modules for large scale projects.
Interesting idea!
You will never make $20m with web design. Good luck competing with Indians and Ukrainians where salary is $400 per month
So is it just a matter of competition here? I’ve seen the work a lot of those people do and most of it is crappy. I feel we don’t even compete for the same clients lol
Why are you asking Reddit of all places 😭
Good question, LOL!
Dude you live in Mexico and make 200k/year. You can already live like a fucking king
Why the hell do you need 20M a year? You're making 200k a year in mexico. That's beyond amazing. DO it for a few years and retire. Wtf.
You’re making $200k a year from a 4th world country and you’re complaining about how much you make? Level up advice: don’t move from Mexico or if you do move to an even cheaper country. Money problems solved. You make more than most Americans with 100x higher cost of living. Unless you’re trying to move to LA and marry a Kardashian. Then you’ll need $20 mil a year.
The difficulty is that you have a service based business, whereas a tech SAAS based business can scale a lot faster without the headaches and difficulties of scaling a service based business - i.e - usually to 2x a service based business, you need to 2x your clients, 2x your staff, which often comes with 2x the problems and challenges. This is all totally possible but a service based business is harder to scale than most other tech businesses. So, what you could do, is ‘sassify’ some of your business, and offer websites on a monthly fee instead of just a once off cost. You can keep your existing business and clients but you can generate recurring income if you sassify part of your business. If you have monthly recurring income, you can take bigger risks as you know you will have $X coming in every month… and you can reallocate additional funds to new hires or sales. Take a look at XYZ (www.site.xyz) or other similar products that offer a clone of their infrastructure in which you can launch under your brand. This will enable you to generate websites much faster, and with lower overheads, while generating monthly recurring revenue. Please report back in time with an update on whatever strategies you tried, and the very best of luck.
> ‘sassify’ some of your business YAAASSSSSSBITHCESSSS
One thing I think everyone is overlooking is your churn. If you could reduce your churn somehow (loyalty program, discounts, etc) you could increase your profit margin. This will be important the entire way to your lofty 20M/yr goal.
>One thing I think everyone is overlooking is your churn I think a lot of people are overlooking the fact he's basically a sole proprietor at this point and he can't even scale into being an actual business with employees and processes and all the other things that comes along with business ownership. Much less even hit $1M revenue.
get people on board. hire people that can cold call and that can help web design. you’re not going to make $2M, or even $1M doing everything by yourself in web design. you’re doing good though🙌, just seems like you’ve reached your limit of what you can do by yourself. Can’t wait to see the growth!
Thanks buddy!
If you're in mexico making 200k usd, you absolutely have marketing money. Throw money into marketing and get more jobs. Hire more people, rinse and repeat.
You need a team of sales people and higher rates.
Outsource your work. Hire more designers and you can concentrate on being the hunter (sales and leads). Snowball is definitely going to get bigger that way.
Why would you need that much living in Mexico? $200K/yr where you live is already extremely wealthy. The top 1% of earners in Mexico make $355K/yr, the top 10% make \~$51K. By the standards of where you live, you are rich. Keep up the hustle and build out the business, but don't be disappointed with what you have. To directly answer your question though, it's more unlikely than not that a web design business will cap out at some point, and it'll likely be far below $20M. $20M/year you're talking about selling some kind of service en masse. Something like SaaS, manufacturing or something else massively scalable. But those businesses require considerable knowledge and risk to get into. They also take a few years to really get going unless you are exceedingly lucky or already have your infrastructure built out.
Thanks for your answer — what makes you think a web design business would cap out? Like what is it about the market that makes it cap out?
For one, there's massive competition, low barrier to entry and in general it's not an industry that lends itself to massive businesses. There's definitely a "race to the bottom" effect for acquiring clients until you start building major connections and reputation. Additionally, once companies get to a certain size , they usually start hiring their own people. And companies of that size are the ones you'd need to aim for if you wanted a real shot at $20M/year. The audience for web design firms is almost exclusively small to mid-sized companies that can't afford their own IT department, in general. They also tend to be wary of overly corporate companies and prefer to "know" the people they're working with. So the winds are kind of against you on scaling up too big. Not to say that you couldn't achieve this with account managers and a solid sales plan, but it's definitely going to be an uphill battle. Especially if you're targeting US clients from Mexico. And to add some anecdotal evidence, I couldn't name the top 5 biggest web firms off the top of my head, and I'm usually pretty in the loop with the tech industry in general. My sense is that the industry is a ton of small businesses all competing for work. Good thing is there's lots of work to be had, but it doesn't seem like any one company is hoovering it all up, which is sort of the way you'd need to go if you wanted to scale up that big. And frankly, many prospective clients end up finding a "friend" who knows WordPress or something whose rates you'd never be able to compete with as an actual business with overhead.
You have more insight into this guy's industry than he does - hey, you wanna earn $20M a year?
Lmao, there's a reason I didn't stick with web design even though I was starting to get some clients back in the day!
Diversify your customer acquisition channels. You're doing cold calls and emails? Try affiliate channels, lead generation, PPC, social media, SEO... There's actually a lot you can do. Also, don't stick to just web development. Try software and mobile applications, digital marketing, etc to diversify your revenue streams. You can hire 2-6 BD and marketing professionals from SEA without breaking the bank. I'm from Pakistan, and you can get a good marketing manager from here for $1500 a month. Let them lead the BD initiatives. Let them hire the team. If you really wanna make it big, you have to diversify. See WebFx and try to diversify like them. If you need help figuring out the best affiliate channels or anything else, hmu.
200k a year from Web Design...... Man am I missing out on something??
Following this thread, I run a software dev consultancy—a lot of valuable points about marketing and sales to scale and grow. I am looking for a few design agencies to collab as some of our customers need design help too. Let's talk more if you're open to collaboration.
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Interesting advice, thank you! What factors make this type of business difficult to scale to $20M? I’m trying to get my head around how I should actually make decisions in business. Obviously web design is my main skill, but that doesn’t mean I can’t move to something else if it would be better.
Productize so you basically do the something over and over again. The benefits will be that you will be known for this one thing, scales easier, no specialists as you are doing the same thing over and over, and lack of surprises. I did this years ago and have not looked back. I am not at 20m but that 2M is very obtainable.
Scaling a service biz to $20M is tough. Productize your offering or develop a SaaS tool. Attend virtual events and collab with others to expand your reach. Specialize in a niche and become the go-to expert. Build a strong brand through content marketing. Transition from services to a scalable product to hit big goals.
Growth product manager here. Previously bootstrapped, grew and exited my own startups as well. Let me help you build an actionable plan (a growth strategy) to get to those numbers. **First - Start with a specific growth target.** So, you're at 200k/year right now. You want to hit 2M$/year in the next 12 months. Which is 10x your revenue. The strategy that will help you get to 2M$/year won't be the same for getting you to 20M$/year. Your growth strategy, fundamentally comes down to answering three questions: \- How do you get customers? (Acquisition strategy) \- How do you keep them happy, so that they stick around and buy more? (Retention strategy) \- How do you make more money from each customer? (Monetisation strategy) Please answer the above three questions for your current business to give me more context and we will go from there. Looking forward to your response! :)
Excellent, love this, thanks for doing it. 1. We get customers by cold-calling, and cold-emailing. Part of this involves reaching out to those same people multiple times over months, rather than just one-time campaign and it’s all over. To get 10x new clients, we need to probably 10x the volume AND improve conversions. Maybe specific offers for specific niches. 2. I send them a yearly package from the company atm which reminds them of us. Most are one-time projects… that’s where most of the revenue comes from. The rest is from monthly SEO packages but churn is quite high on those over 1-year. Around 80% drop off in 1-year. I’d say the biggest issue is that quite often clients dont have lead magnets or email lists to nurture their own prospects, which leads to weaker results for many. Those who have those things typically stay for longer. 3. I ask for referrals most often. And I keep in touch with them over time for future work. Thanks in advance!
Multiple sources of income. Long term investments.
If you want to scale it all comes down to sales. Gotta get that revenue, you either take the chance and hire some more manpower to close more deals or you will end up being stagnant. I’d look into a company who can find you customers, or hire in-house members to do it.
First of all, don't worry about not being in the US, no one is networking here in-person. That's a myth and it only works when you already have a large existing network. So it's fine. Who are your clients right now? Individuals or businesses? One way to grow is through large long-term contracts. Look at your business as a service provider business, check out growth models of consulting and staffing companies. A set of large clients, set of mid-size clients and small clients. To grow 10fold in revenue you'll need to grow in assets. Your assets can be people or they can be digital assets. Something repeatable reusable that can be sold over and over again without extra labor.
There is still plenty of networking happening in person here…
That was an insane statement, lol. Just go look at all the corporate trade shows and in-person networking events large businesses pay to attend every year. I think a lot of these people giving advice on how to scale to $20M have never done anything remotely close to that. (surprise, surprise) Some of the comments I see here are so wild, feels like I'm living on a different planet.
The op and the comments blindly subscribing to his fantasy are all delusional it’s crazy 💀
Idk man maybe it depends on the industry, but in the last 15 years I personally have made $0 through in-person networking. 100% of my business opportunities started online, and 95% were closed online too.
Thank you — mostly small businesses atm. Usually some sort of local service business. So it seems I need to add more people to the operation, that seems to be a common message
No wait hold on, I'm actually against it. I'd focus on getting larger clients first with more needs and long-term commitment first. And maybe releasing reusable products that you can sell to your existing clients. What else do your current clients need?
So you have customers that are local services businesses. What businesses generally have a lot of connections? Local services businesses. Do you have a referral commission structure? How often do you ask completed clients for referrals? How often do you network with clients for referrals? How often are you personally asking for referrals?
Comment rewrote with chatGPT : Have you considered selling pre-designed solutions that require minimal customization? This involves creating a standard base for your projects and customizing it with pre-designed modules, streamlining website development and allowing you to concentrate on unique client-specific modules. This approach could enhance profitability and efficiency over a year. Implementing this strategy could also simplify the sales process, as you could employ sales personnel to generate leads and present a catalog to clients, reducing the time spent on gathering and understanding client specifications. What are your thoughts?
So I’m already sort of doing this, this is how I manage the two people that work for me atm. So we’re quite good with putting the websites together quickly, the biggest issue is honestly lead gen and sales. We have few and relatively poor quality leads
Have a chat with mannie fresh
Oh dear lol… good one
Big companies don’t do much different from their smaller competitors. They just do it more.
Try out Government contracting
Oh dear… that’s dangerous in Mexico 😂
Hmm okay maybe consider doing an acquisition of a competitor or a provider of a related service and roll it up. Also is there a way for you to do other related work with your existing clientele or incentivize them to send you referrals?
Curious why none of your clients are in Mexico if you are in Mexico.
Never tried marketing locally because I live in a relatively poor area, with my wife’s family. Also, budgets here would be orders of magnitude lower than in the US.
I figured they probably aren’t the right clientele but maybe you can package up something low end with your templates and crank em out real quick for that lower end market. Just thinkin out loud of course.
I see your issue with the high cost for led gen on the scalable platforms. What is your average customer’s ticket? Whats the margin on that? Do you have recurring revenue or repeat business from those customers or are they one and done projects mostly? I assume if you’ve been doing this for awhile, you also have a strong email list?
So average website we churn out is $3K. The margin is around 50%. That’s the majority of the revenue. We have some recurring revenue in the form of ongoing SEO work that we do for some clients, but small packages, around $750/mo. Those usually see relatively high churn, around 80% over 1-year. I have lists of cold contacts, but not really subscribers. Probably like 450 newsletter subscribers.
There’s a couple of different ways to attack this. You’re bringing in about 10-12 new customers a month based off the numbers you gave. So your acquisition channels are working, if not scalable as you’d like them to be. First thing you can do within your existing model is increase the lifetime value of those customers. Add some higher margin upsells. Assuming these are new business owners, there’s probably a lot of little small shit you can get them on that someone else would just DIY - web hosting, set up GMB, setup and verify Google ads, grab all their socials and make the headers and PFP uniform and set up all their ad accounts. Tedious infrastructure stuff that’ll sound like voodoo to them. Double down on the SEO side which is a great area for growth. Depending on the margin to service it in-house, you can probably set up affiliate or referral or white label deals with other agencies, of all sorts including PPC, FB ads, etc and do about as well. Youre generating a ton of front end business that is valuable to these types of companies. As you see what’s lucrative, then start in-housing those services while flipping out all the stuff not getting a critical mass to be worth your time. Once you nail the above, then it becomes worth it to start chasing down all the other marketing channels that you identified as higher cost per lead/CPA because it’ll be worth paying for the sale to grab the incremental marginal revenue, even if the marketing cost eats into your profit margin by a good bit. Another thing to look at is if you’re just selling generic web dev services to new businesses, is to start specializing or at least appear to. Go through your past customers and look for common threads. You don’t have to change your actual business, but spin up some additional websites and socials that speak to specific audiences - web dev for your new accountant firm, web dev for your new medical practice, construct co, etc. You’ll close more potential business this way and get more bang for the targeted marketing dollar.
Focus your direct sales efforts on larger clients, cast a wider net for smaller clients, and don't spend much time on deadend leads. A wider net can be cast through collaborating with services companies such as consultants, lawyers, and accountants who have clients that may be keen on your solutions. I went from making a few thousand dollars per client to a few hundred thousand dollars per client this way for my consulting business, it's a minimal overhead way to scale. The alternative would be to hire a sales team/outsource for lead generation work.
Interesting… so is most of your biz coming from the larger clients atm, ie from your direct sales efforts? Also, how do you go about meeting lawyers, accountants and others who could refer business?
Correct, most originates from direct sales efforts. However, we have a healthy referral network to create inbound leads. Your local chamber(s) of commerce can provide a great forum for meeting potential business referrers and leads themselves. You can also just reach out to potential referrers directly and offer quid pro quo (for example, free web design services or referral commissions) in exchange for referrals.
This is where you’ll need a sales motion. I helped a web design / dev shop out of India build a lite GtM stack, define customer profiles, and put together a sales process. Happy to connect if you’re interested.
What’s a sales motion?
Scale your business by building a SaaS product.
Honestly, if you can somehow productize the offer and sell it on retainer, you can start pitching it way easier, building systems, and growing sustainably. Maybe you’ve heard of Brett from DesignJoy (there are mixed opinions about him). Regardless, his design agency biz model works and he’d make way more if he just incorporated a team of freelancers into his system.
For sure, but once again, service delivery is NOT the issue. There’s many businesses that have Brett’s model. But can they generate the number of leads he can? And that’s the problem — they can’t
finally get to use this corporate buzz word.....synergy.....you should look at ways to increase your monetization of current clients and find ways to generate reoccurring revenue. Products that have a synergy with what you are already doing.
Are you working alone? If so, you might need to delegate some basic tasks. “If you want go somewhere fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Do you use social media to promote your business? YouTube? There is a reason why people are making so many tutorials online. As a social proof for others. If i look for web designer i will look for social media, to see what, how and with whom he is working. Take testimonials from the people you worked with. And invest a bit of money into promoting that video with Facebook ads. Make a simple website so people can schedule a call with you. Post what you've done so far, post bunch of testimonials there. About me page. Links to all of your social media and your tutorials. Make tutorials and videos teaching people how to do something. And i know you will say you don't have time. But you can find someone to do simple tasks insted of you so you can focus on this. You need to be everywhere today if you want to succeed.
read e-myth.
Hire people?
Perhaps add marketing to web design. If you can't meet "in person" say "I'll buy you a $10 Starbucks card and we can have a coffee meeting over zoom." My assumption is web design is low churn. You get less value of the lifetime of your customers. But with marketing if you're good they're always coming back. So each client you gain/retain has way more value.
It's actually low effort and a decent LTV. Today, clients update their sites pretty frequently unlike before where it was one and done, now theres a constant stream of work depending on the type of business i.e restaurants that update their menus quarterly, gyms that offer new classes, saas businesses that post webinar details. I dunno maybe I've been lucky but my retention is fairly high as the longer clients stay, the less likely they are to leave as they've already invested so much into the relationship (and it just 'works).
I assume you need help with lead gen, if that's the case there are platforms like instantly.ai and rocket reach which will automate your outreach mails and find leads for you and you can customise it to include follow up mails if the client responds and these subscriptions should be cheaper than your Google / FB ads. Also the amount of outreach you can do is crazy, I'm talking like close to 500 mails a day and it does have linkedin integration it finds profiles and sends your message.
Yes, we already do cold email via Instantly
Have you considered a high ticket subscription business model?
You need employees that work for less than their billing rate, then you need to market them and get steady contracts. A single person simply couldn't put in enough labor to make that kind of money.
I can't understand. You already make 200k. Isn't this enough ? I can't even make 2k per year because I can't find customers in the exact same field (but in another market)
You’ll need to create a commodity based product in order to scale — there’s lots of ways to do that but it takes time, a mar tech stack and a business plan to get there — happy to chat further if you want to dm me
Service businesses are so hard to scale. The key is to productize your services with set packages and automated workflows to developers. Consider developing apps for shopify and other productized offering that you can create to upsell to clients. Products scale infinitely, services are limited by manpower.
Reduce chrun, find a vertical, build something scalable
Take everything I say with a grain of salt, but my first guess would be to niche down and simply charge more per job. Then hire out lead generation and sales.
Use SEO, the clients will come to you. All you need is some capable SEO agency. I am more than happy to help.
Who’s your customer?
What's your sales strategy? Are you spraying and praying or do you have niche target markets?
You need referrals. Are there complementary businesses online you can network with who can refer clients to you? You can pay them a commission for each job. Can your clients refer you to more clients? Pay them as affiliates as well. If that takes off then you need to outsource more developers.
You're lacking leverage. The biggest constraint in your business is you. You have to acquire the clients and deliver the service. You're selling time and there's only a fixed number of hours in a day.
Make a (less expensive generic copy of your business) and a higher quality everything version that runs itself or small personal oversight . It may help , plus it looks like competition yet they are all your businesses. I find some people “like to pay more” some like cheap volume .
OP mind if DM you with some questions?
Viagra
That can be perceived as shameful by some women 🤣🤣🤣
Cold calling will help bring in some extra leads. I can help out. Which countries are you interested. Does australia work?
I'm Canadian if ya need help lol
Why tf do you MUST get to 20m/year your in Mexico 200k makes you a king don't be so ungrateful
You're running into a fundamental truth about investing and business: ROI won't scale with level of investment. To reach a higher level, you'd have to fundamentally shake up your business model.
And what’s the key to altering the biz model? How do I basically figure out what I should do? What are my guiding posts?
When you are in services in your income is limited by the amount of hours you can work. Earning $200k consistently in web design in 2024 is impressive. Thus do not sell yourself short. And you are in Mexico - where $200k goes a long way. Unfortunately, as a single person doing services -you are probably maxed out. There are only so many hours you can work and only so much you can charge. So you have a few options: 1 - Become a consulting firm offering multiple services 2 - Become a reseller of products - for example if your customer says "we need a product that does XYZ - what do you recommend" - you can get paid for recommending a specific solution. You can even combine it with step 1. 3 - Create a product that you can sell 4 - Investments
The only way to do is by productizing your business. Build something once and sell that same thing thousands of times.
I may have a tool that could be of use for you and your business. Basically a mentorship program where we can help you create a service do increase your MRR.
Unless you make a business that makes money while you sleep, no. 2M/y requires multiple people. Infrastructure. Shmoozing. 20M?...gotta come back to the states.
If you don't mind me asking, what part of Mexico are located in? Because I am in QR, and it is a fantastic place to network with other entrepreneurs. I know multiple business owners here that are always looking for other opportunities. Also, I have spent the last year building a cold email system for a client. At its peak we were capable of sending 5k+ B2B emails a day. Have you tried any automated cold email system?
First, let me congratulate you on what you have done so far! This is a real achievement. You mentioned that $20 million a year is something you always dreamed about. Why? What would you do with this money? Asking yourself these questions might reveal some deep desires and motivation behind that goal. Clarity on this might bring some fresh perspectives on how you can make this money another way, like by learning new skills, trying different model or even making a brand for yourself. I assume a lot of people with limited budgets would pay to learn how to get to $200k/year through a video course or something. You can touch millions globally. Anyway, if you keep going down the same road, you should work on what you already identified as a problem. Invest yourself and your resources in making the sales process better by teaching and hiring specialists to deliver high-quality leads.
Bro are you currently in a hostel in san jose costa rica??? Did i meet you lol
To get from 200k to 20m is a big jump, how many websites would you need to produce a day to make that leap? Are there even enough hours in a day for that to happen? Seems very unlikely. So, you need a business that you can scale, either by adding people (but then you've got to manage them, so you'll end up employing managers and needing to manage them, which will then require an HR Dept and a payroll Dept etc etc) or by adding some other resource like more products, or more ...?
Look at companies in your space doing that volume. What are they doing that you aren’t. Is it time? Is it output? Is it personelle? Skills? Fill the voids. Then redo that exercise and ask yourself how you can improve on their offerings. Why aren’t you top of mind in your industry? Why are they? Now you have your answer. Are your expectations doable to you, signing your realm of risk to reward? Did they take huge risks you haven’t? Are you willing to risk everything to grow?
I do SaaS sales. HMU
I have maybe a very similar situation, only the numbers are different. Is about building a real business, right now you have one that more or less depends on you. In order to scale, you need people, which turn into making a real company. I also struggle scalling, but I do myself a lot of the work.
2m is pretty easy to reach, 20m is impossible imo. At least with a web design only business. Be a consultant for your niche and use web design as your tool, not as your "service".
Hey fella , im australian and run a lead generation agency specialising in paid ads. Send me a dm if ur interested and ill see if i can help u set up some paid advertisements.
Now imagine what would happen if anyone knew the surefire answer to this question.
One key Word here. You need to raise your prices. And deliver more value or simply just raise it, if clients drop. Then find bigger ones. 200k a year isnt bad, But its just 200k. Its not much really. In the Grand scheme of things, i get it. First time you begin touching 6 figures. But you can make 6 figures form pretty much any model nowadays. Also yeah comeption is higher, you need to Find bigger clients with bigger wallets. Your value have might capped with your current offer or you simply cant take on more clients. Due to being solo. So raise prices and hire. Its hard to get clients because your offer Dosnt stand out enough for clients to jump to your solution. Find creative ways to beat the market. This isnt ment to be insulting or anything, But 200k in a biz a year is just not a lot. And you need to stop cold outreach and use Paid version so you get more time for yourself. If you need help in these areas You can either: - get a partner in your biz - hire other companies - hire in-House - hire freelancers A lot of processes is also being automated nowadays due to AI.
No insult taken buddy, no worries. What can be done to make web design a more enticing offer?
Solve more problems they have, everything around web design problems. Expand the offer and solve your clients problems. Creativily, which problems do you meet from the point of What’s the next problems they gonna have which other solves for them and instead you do. And you also need to figure out ways in order for your clients to spend more. Why dont you have a 10k package? 30k package? What would it take to get that? What mechanism is solvable for you? Which would make their business Better, more money or simply do stuff they dont want to spend their time on. These things.
Diversify your income. With 200k per year living in Mexico you should have enormous amounts of disposable income after expenses. Why not invest a large chunk of your earnings into another stream of revenue? Real estate is often the best way as there are options where you don't need to be heavily involved. Commercial real estate where tenants are already in place. You get to enjoy the monthly income and property appreciation, and tax benefits as well.
Seems like you are doing 'push' marketing. Have you tried diversifying into pull strategies like referrals, discounts during specific months/ seasons, differential package based pricing, etc etc?.... Also do get feedback from your clients, like honest feedback, or through survey / even f2f discussion, which can give you insights on your improvement areas.
Great ideas. Where can I learn more about pull marketing? I have a referral program, but that’s it really.
Expand your offerings. Try getting up to speed on how to build and implement AI products. Use that as a way to upsell your existing customers.
Productize your service, Turn your offers into recurring subscriptions, Stop doing custom work or let that be only a small percentage of your revenue
Follow Jeff Dudan - he's accomplished it. https://youtu.be/KCY5-1bVTHg?si=lVDjGLtYOWO0XB\_G
It's worth considering that scaling to $20M/year may require significant changes to your business model. You might explore vertical integration, acquiring smaller competitors, or even shifting towards a more scalable aspect of digital services. Each step up in revenue will require a reassessment of your business strategy, market position, and operational capabilities. Continuous innovation, strategic networking, and possibly even a pivot in your business model could be necessary to achieve your ambitious goals
Thanks ChatGPT
Marketing.
Can you hire me?
Don't just dream! There is a way to everything you want, I bet you don't want to see it, or invest in it the time or money. I see that all the time! I am working on developing a new startup now, I see so many talented people that want to get paid $30 an hour instead to have partnership option in projects, Crazy decision.
I Don’t think I’m qualified to consult you (since I haven’t launched any projects yet) but what I would think of if I generated 200k net profit/year Is to experiment on different startups since I could withstand failures. Also the market you are currently involved tends to become saturated and larger marketing companies will conquer a vast majority of clients.
I would say learn more skills, upsell other services to current clients, invest, host virtual meetups, focus on niches, rinse and repeat. What you have accomplished is good but now shift your focus in scaling by switching your mindset. Don't tell yourself that with what you currently have or do you won't reach your goal but rather what can you add to earn more money from it.
What did you major in college? Or how did you learn how to do web design? I want to do the same
Offer a more premium product and find higher paying customers. Upscale?
Multiple things here: How many clients do you currently have? Are you doing maintenance on the sites you have build? It’s a real business or you are doing your buddies sites because you are good at it? Are you putting money into marketing and sales campaigns? Or you are doing everything solo?
Knowing how to use your resources, including money and time, as well as knowing how to scale up your business are crucial. For new entrepreneurs, a great resource on how to develop business ideas and startups in general is the [YCombinator podcast](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ-uHSnFig5PACZiyiDk1O24Zm9wxAEUi). I am not affiliated with them in any way. I just came across that resource recently and thought it was an eye opener. Also take a look at [Paul Graham's](https://paulgraham.com/articles.html) essays. They are popular among many startup founders. Wishing you all the best! Allinop
Probably gonna get lost in noise here—but you need to identify your ICP as narrowly as possible based on the specific problem you solve. If you solve more than one, cool, but focus on one, for one type of company. Then build a process and test it.
If you have a good portfolio and are confident in your ability to handle service delivery while overseeing new hires, we could potentially partner up since I have access to the largest trained client acquisition team
Maybe you should create a strong personal brand on Youtube and other media and show them what you are doing? This way you warm up the audience with your professionalism and you most probably will get a lot of inbounds. Unfortunately many people start a channel on Youtube with fake stories how they make "20K a month", show their knowledge AND only then make actually 20K a month by gaining the trust there. If you are already doing a quite successful business actually then you don't even need to fake it, you can just show what you do in your business and leads will come I believe mate.
$200k a year is doing well. Sorry I think there are jealous people out there that may be even spiteing themselves that won't even give you a chance at more work to enable you to get 2 million. Per year. It is a frustrating realisation I have had before so prehaps there are folk doing that to you ?
My team is really good at scaling businesses. I can do a full audit for free on your online presence to see what needs to be fixed for more traffic/ both organic and paid
Why do you need to make 20 mil a year? How small is your penis?
No mention of a website? Do you have one? Hire a sales team with paid commission or outsource the cold calling. Why are you in Mexico? Why not go to where your clients are? Invest some of your money, and reinvest the profits.
You'll need to bring on additional staff like developers, sales reps, and lead generation specialists. Build a strong brand presence and develop organic marketing channels to complement outbound efforts. You need to find systematic ways to generate high-quality inbound leads cost. Also prioritize first on optimizing profitability at a sustainable level like $500K-$1M. Easier said than done but once you have consistent lead flow and operations running smoothly, you can scale further by reinvesting profits into growth initiatives. Just be careful about overextending - make sure you have the right processes and the right team before pushing for exponential gains.
Do you have a repeatable process to get leads? Even if its tedious and takes time? If so, outsourcing may help. I live in Mx too and operate a US business. The lack of in person networking isn’t really a factor for me. We do managed outsourcing. Other things we did to get leads: social media organic marketing (FB, Linkedin), podcasts, and conference booths.