084: How to Grow Your Web Design Business Using the BBB Strategy
On your journey to building a successful design business, you will inevitably run into challenges. These are the bottlenecks to your progress. Each challenge, once you overcome it, brings you to the next level. Solve for the bottleneck and you unlock the next level. Knowing what kind of a challenge you are facing will help you tremendously in breaking through that bottleneck. In this article, I will share with you how to spot bottlenecks and ways to solve them using the Business Bottleneck Breakthrough Strategy.
Business Bottleneck Breakthrough Strategy is all about understanding what the four main business categories are, how they apply to your specific business model and then learning to assess the revenue bottleneck through this lens. Read on to see my examples and explanation.
Four Categories That Need Your Attention
As an online entrepreneur, these are some overarching categories in your business that need your attention:
1. Marketing (Content Creation, List Building, Public Relations, Ads - long term)
2. Acquisition (Short-term Client acquisition)
3. Production (Serving Clients)
4. Administrative (Accounting, HR, Taxes)
To make the distinction between Marketing and Acquisition, think of marketing as all the things you do to create traffic to your site, to create inquiries for your services. And acquisition is everything that you do to turn that traffic/inquiry into clients. So that means responding to client requests, writing proposals, doing complimentary consultations, these all fall under Acquisition.
Production is the actual delivering of the task you are hired for, so in your case the web site end result. Things that can be a bottleneck is your workflow, how you set boundaries, communication with your clients, scope creep where the project included x number of things and now it has grown to include several other things, delivering the launch training, domain transfer/redirect process, and so on.
Administration includes everything you need to keep the business running. Keeping records of income and expenses, doing the tax work, managing your team, taking care of legal aspects like establishing an LLC, privacy policy, and so on and so forth.
You need to find out what that bottleneck is, solve for it, and then move on to the next level. At each level, you will find a new bottleneck, either in the same category or in a different one. Round and round this goes!
Example of My Bottleneck
Let me give you an example of what I am currently facing in my business. I have a web design business where I am serving clients in a variety of ways. There are full website builds, smaller redesigns, quick fixes and tweaks, third-party app integration and one to one trainings or hourly packages. My previous marketing efforts are paying off for my design business as I have clients who find me and hire me. And now I am running into a bottleneck.
My bottleneck: hitting a revenue and time ceiling with 1 to 1 design projects.
The bottleneck is that I can only serve so many clients in the number of hours given. My time is limited and with 1 to 1 client projects so is my revenue. I am working for dollars in exchange of hours and so this is to be expected. I can continue like this and that can work fine. But I aspire to create more breathing room in my schedule. I aspire for more time and I want to find leveraged ways of serving so I can earn more as well. That’s where my bottleneck is.
That’s one of the reasons I created the Millionaire Web Designer Program so that I could serve more people in the limited time that I have while increasing my earnings. But now I am running into a new bottleneck.
New bottleneck: I am still building an audience base of web designers and I am at the early stage of marketing.
So my new bottleneck is marketing and finding the budding web designers for whom my offer can be really valuable. Once I can find them, build the like, know and trust factor, then we can work together in building their web design business.
This type of bottleneck is typical of any new business where you do not have an audience or a client base. So your first step is to find the right marketing tool that will help you find the clients for your product or service. New web designers face this problem where they have the skills and the desire to serve but don’t know how to find the clients who will hire them. Once you solve for this bottleneck, then you have made it to the next level. Later on that new level, you will solve for the next bottleneck such as communication, workflow, finance management, leveraged services/packages and so on. But for now, you have made progress!
So if you are new web designer working on creating a consistent income stream with web design projects, there’s one question I want you to ask yourself:
What Bottleneck Am I Facing In My Business Right Now?
Is it that you don’t have your first client? (See blog 085 for a Client Finding Strategy you can put into place today.) Or you have clients but you are not scheduling them properly and finding that you are overbooking your calendar. Or you find a client, work for them, then you have no clients and you are in acquisition mode again. Then you get a client, deliver their website and after the project is over, you are back in search for the next client. Tell me in the comments what your bottleneck is. I will be happy to give you laser coaching in the comments to help you forward!
If marketing is a bottleneck for you, I want you to brainstorm ways you can get more eyes on your business. What kinds of things can you undertake so that you can get seen? There are many different options from creating content on your site, to guest-posting, to finding platforms where you can present your services, connecting with your existing network.
This is how you apply the Business Bottleneck Breakthrough Strategy to open up the revenue flow. Use this strategy and unlock the next stage in your business.
You have a dream to build a thriving web design business? You can make it happen!
Peace,
Sophia
