[bojangles]

(11-07-2013 08:05 AM)Brisey Wrote:  

(11-07-2013 07:09 AM)bojangles Wrote:  

I'm trying to get into Digital Project Management right now, I was a PM in an investment bank but I want to leave that industry, I've got a PRINCE2 Practitioner, I've applied to a few contracts but no luck, but it be better for me to spend some money creating a website and say that I worked on building that digital project?

Loads of dough in banking isn't there mate? It seems extremely difficult to get into. I've applied for a few contracts over the years but didn't get anywhere due to having no banking experience.

There is but you need to have specific technical experience in certain divisions and it's not just about holding the Prince2 qualification. You've got to start as a bottom feeder in project support.

[one-two]

OP

Quote:

You show me a pay stub for $12,000 on it, I quit my job right now and I come work for you

[LouieG]

Ha. Well if you insist—



12.5, my b.

But don't quit your job just yet—that's from a client, not my pay stub. So I gotta pay contractors, taxes, expenses, and then I'm reinvesting heavily in the business, too.

For now, my take home is fine but meager compared to total revenue. I'm playing for the longterm.

Edit: Not to make this a dick waving contest. But I myself am a cynical fuck and would tend to doubt the numbers people throw around online.

[VincentVinturi]

Great post LouieG, thanks for taking the time to write this up.

I worked at an eComm company for about a year and watched the partners run the business. It looked very similar to what you describe. It sounds like a lot of moving parts and like it would be hard to disappear for a while for a vacation or completely unplug.

What are you thoughts on the potential to sell your business, passive income potential, hiring out managers and payroll and basically taking yourself out of the picture with this business model so you own it but don't have to juggle it?

[evilhei]

Very good thread. I like the detail day description. I also find many similarities to my daily routine but also something new that seems very intreresting. Waiting for other parts of your story, specially how you got started and you are finding good customers.

[FunctionalPsycho]

Very Informative thread. Waiting for more!

[kaka]

Is there a subscribe feature on this forum? I'm following this for sure. Thank you for the knowledge.

Right now I'm taking a Adobe CS6 class on udemy which consist of illustrator, dreamweaver, and photoshop, and some other software. Do you think its wise to spend my time learning cs6?

I'm an entrepreneur and definitely want to run my own business. I just figured that it would be good to know at least the foundations of the systems used. Or spend my time trying to get clients and hire people to make the websites?

Thank you.

[Cattle Rustler]

there's a subscribe to this thread feature at the bottom of each thread page.

[numanist]

How do you go about soliciting contracts, and also how do you find quality coders and designers?

[2014]

aside from management skills, you need what skills in coding?

As far as I could tell, anyone could do this... unless there is a hidden barrier to entry I can't see?

[FunctionalPsycho]

MOAR!!

[saeta119]

so that's it? no more updates?

[kaka]

He's probably busy, mate

[saeta119]

yeah, unfortunate, he was providing some in depth info.

[kaka]

I'm sure OP will provide more information. It would be great if he did, but I understand that the hustle is more important.

[bojangles]

Barriers to Entry are you need agency experience.

[Cattle Rustler]

(11-12-2013 05:45 PM)bojangles Wrote:  

Barriers to Entry are you need agency experience.

I've seen this in many job postings "previous agency experience".......WTF do they mean by this?

[Don]

I know you're probably busy LouieG, just don't abandon the thread pls, there are a lot of people interested in what you have to say.

[AntiTrace]

(11-12-2013 05:45 PM)bojangles Wrote:  

Barriers to Entry are you need agency experience.

You don't need any experience to start a business. Your working for yourself, there is no one to tell you "you need more experience"

Clients, on the other hand, may not work with you until you have more work in your portfolio. Your not gonna land a corporate client your first go, you gotta do some local stuff and work you way up.

You don't need "agency experience" to hire some developers.

[Hotwheels]

This is essentially sales.

How do you get experience?

Go out and do it. Tell them what they need to hear and think outside the box to get a "portfolio".

[Saladin]

(11-12-2013 05:45 PM)bojangles Wrote:  

Barriers to Entry are you need agency experience.

Don't see how this applies if you're working for yourself like OP....

[LouieG]

Busy weekend here. I’ll reply to questions and PMs quick as I can.

Also— I’ve been struck by the number of guys here with jobs similar to mine. As I’m about to explain, I backed into this line of work with zero experience, and I’ve only been at it a couple years. To this day, I regularly feel like I’m making it up as I go.

So if any of you catch me spouting bullshit or notice something I could improve, by all means, say so.

PART 3: Getting Started



3.1 Just Go With It

For the lulz: how I landed my first project.

I was working an unrelated job in Kuala Lumpur and one night went to visit a friend who lived above Pavilion Mall, if any of you knows it. In the elevator to my friend’s apartment, a Chinese man struck up a conversation with me.

Being white in Malaysia, you get opened more often and enthusiastically than Scarlett Johansson walking through downtown Hyderabad. Over time, that started really pissing me off. But, it’s hard not to look back on this particular encounter as a major, positive inflection moment in my life. Shit’s funny that way.

Anyway, the guy’s English was bad as my Malay, and as we talked he got the impression I built websites.

I tried correcting him——but, nothing doing.

We chatted, best as we could, for 15 or 20 minutes. Turned out he was an importer and wholesaler... and he wanted an online catalog for his customers... and he wanted LouieG, Ace Caucasian Web Developer, to build it.

To bring things to an friendly conclusion, I said Yeah, no problem, gave him my card, and figured I’d never hear from the guy again.

A few days later, he emailed an RFP, in garbled English, describing the website he wanted.

Even minus the language barrier, the technical jargon would’ve been Greek to me, but there was one thing that I did understand: He listed his budget as Rm 15–20k. About $6000.

At a previous job, I’d used WordPress & knew that out-of-the-box eCommerce themes sold for less than $100. Did a little more research, and realized the RFP didn’t ask for any functionality that wasn't available, by default, in open source eCommerce CMSs.

I remember thinking, Well goddamn.

So I pulled a contract template off Google, pasted the RFP text into the contract’s body, priced the job at Rm 19k, then called my new friend and told him we had a deal. I got a check for half the money within the week.

I hired a college friend who majored in CS to help me along the way. He set me up with Magento and a Magento theme, found & configured the hosting service, checked my work versus best practices, did some customization of product categories, and eventually handled the launch.

I did content insertion, played around with Magento’s built-in options, and learned enough HTML to add pictures and links to the homepage slider blocks. Simple shit, but being an absolute beginner it took me awhile.

Kickoff to launch, the project took three weeks and I estimate I spent 50 hours on it. I paid my friend $1000 for something like 15 hours of work, so I netted about $5k.

That's $100 / hr for work I had no ‘qualifications’ to do. My interest was piqued.

But, new clients were not beating down my door on the basis of that first site, which meant I’d have to scramble for sale #2.

The good news was that, just after the Magento site launched, I went back to the U.S. for a month. I spent most of that time finding / approaching potential clients, and I started to establish a little sales pipeline.

That month was my first foray into sales and—I remember very distinctly—there were a lot more misses than hits. But here’s what I found worked...


3.2 Solid Fundamentals

To date, 90% of my projects have been on one of four platforms: WordPress, Drupal, Magento, and Squarespace.

If you’ve never done any web dev before, read about the out-of-the-box features and functionality of those four CMSs. Find a couple sample sites and play around with them—ThemeForest is my go-to resource for sampling WordPress themes and has some good Magento stuff as well.

That should take you two hours, tops.

(In my business life, I’m a big proponent of learning only what's necessary. Never let the nagging sense that you need to learn more get in the way of turning a profit.)

Two hours will give a strong grasp on what’s possible from a high-level perspective: using open source CMSs and ready-made themes / plugins, you can do ecommerce, portfolios, photo galleries, mailing list integration, blogs, etc. That's what really matters.

During the sales process (likely later in the project too), clients will ask specific questions about those top-level features that you won’t have an answer to. Happens to me nearly every day. They’ll want to know how to do something, whether it’s possible, what the industry standard is, how much it will cost, etc.

The answer to those questions is, “Yes, it’s possible, but let me double check the specifics and get back to you.” Then research, learn it cold, and give them a great answer. Never let them see you stumped.

The bigger lesson there is, always tell potential clients "yes.”

(Unless the answer is obviously “no.” Over time, you’ll develop a sense for when the answer is obviously no.)

But right off the bat, it’s pretty fucking unlikely your clients will want anything that isn’t extremely standard. They’ll be mostly low-budget, non-technical folks, and they won’t have the savvy to think of things that are difficult to implement. Your default response to any request should be, “yes.”:

So: 30 minutes of experience with WordPress, Drupal, Magento, and Squarespace, plus the “always say yes” principle. That’s the fundamental knowledge you need to sell your first site.

Sounds like many of you are already lightyears ahead of that—try not to let that get in your way


3.3 Finding Likely Clients

Don’t respond to RFPs. Don’t build a website and wait for work to come your way. I can’t say ‘don’t buy paid advertising,’ since I’ve never tried it, but my gut is you shouldn’t buy paid advertising.

Instead, create a list of likely clients and get yourself in front of them. A likely client is:

1) A functioning, for-profit business - Don’t bother with friends, artists, musicians, startups, academics.

It sounds hard-hearted, but I write off non-profits too. When I was a beginner, non-profits fell in one of two camps: Those who couldn’t pay me, and those who could pay so much they’d never bother with me. Probably there’s a middle ground but I never found it.

2) Has no website or a crappy website - Confirm you can make a better website than what they already have before pitching them.

3) Needs a website - Almost every business needs a web presence, but many high-profile businesses get theirs for free thanks to Yelp and similar business directories.

Restaurants, for example, can skimp on the website, as long as their Yelp reviews are good. Same for many businesses in the leisure / entertainment and retail arenas.

OTOH, many B2B and service niches have no directory site with the authority or Google-ranking power of Yelp. If you find a printed phone book (assuming those still exist), flip through the Yellow Pages and you’ll see a bunch of them. For example, after the Malaysian wholesaler, my next four sites were…

—an art appraiser
—a boutique investment bank
—a kitchen / bath design studio
—a cosmetics wholesaler

For businesses like these, a good website and a good Google page rank for keyword variations on “[their niche] [their geographic location]” is absolute gold.

The art appraiser mentioned above went from zero web presence to being, for a few months, the first result for several art appraisal keywords + “New York City.”

Concurrently, he went from being de facto retired to busier than ever before in his career.

Businesses like these stand to reap serious benefits from putting a decent site online; you are not peddling snake oil. Once you identify them, all you’ve gotta do is get in front of them, and convince them as much.

4) High margin, low volume - I recommend the sites you try to sell cost several thousand dollars apiece (and a lot more, eventually).

If a site has to generate 1000 leads to pay off that investment, it’s probably not worth it for the client. (True for the clients you’ll start with; obviously not for major brands / retailers.)

But that art appraiser I mentioned charged upwards of $10k per engagement. Based on the leads his $8k site generated, the ROI for its first year online was something like 1250%.

That’s a much easier sale than telling some cafe you’ll build a site that sends 5,000 sandwich eaters their way.


3.4 First Contact

My cold approach was simple. I printed 200 glossy postcards with a nice photo and my business’s name on one side, and blank space + fine printed contact info on the other.

In the blank space, I Sharpie’d two columns:

Left column - What I estimated the business’s profit to be on one sale, two sales, three sales, etc, of whatever service they offered. I kept my estimates of their profit-per-sale very conservative. I remember the principal of the investment bank laughed in my face for guessing he made only $20k per engagement.

That was embarrassing, but then he signed on for a $17k website, which provided a great deal of consolation.

Right column - The cost of a basic website. I made sure the cost was always less than the profit from two (at most three) sales for the client.

At the bottom I included a little note saying I’d like to meet & discuss further. I mailed them out on a Monday.

Almost nobody called back, and no one I ultimately sold to did. But I spent all day Thursday and Friday placing follow up calls, introducing myself, and asking if they’d received my postcard.

Many that I spoke to had, and a lot said they wanted to learn more. I kept these phone calls brief, and pushed for in-person talks. Some balked, some bit.

I set up a round of meetings for the next few weeks.


3.5. The Insta–Portfolio

You inexperience is a liability* and I highly recommend… massaging the truth to cover it up.

I arrived at my first sales meetings with a laptop, a link to my Magento site, and screenshots of 8–10 premium WordPress themes: a portfolio theme, a restaurant theme, an ecommerce theme, etc.

If you want to get fancy, sign up for an account at DreamHost or Bluehost or [insert cheap web host here], pirate some premium themes, and install them on your server.

If you’ve never done that before, don’t worry. There are tutorials that explain how to do it in <10 minutes.

Then strip out the test content, replace with lorem ipsum, and tell the client you made the sites.

That’s it. An hour’s work, and you’ve got a portfolio with sites suited to a variety of businesses, all featuring professional-quality design, retina-ready graphics, three responsive breakpoints, parallax scrolling, SEO-optimized design, whateverthefuck—reading the theme descriptions and memorizing these selling points is also very handy in making yourself sound more experienced than you are.

[Sidenote: If you have an ethical bone in your body, lying like this should give you at least a moment’s pause. I know I felt weird about it, at first.

Now I remember that feeling and think, Was I ever so young?

Since my business has taken off (basically the last 12 months), I’ve partnered with a couple legit agencies to pitch big design / dev deals. That’s given me the chance to sit in pitch meetings and listen to veteran Creative Directors claim they’re best buds with major names in web / app design, then walk out of the meeting and laugh about how they’ve never even met those guys.

I’ve seen agencies / designers contribute ten pixels of design to a project, then include it as the centerpiece of their portfolio.

I know of multiple dev firms that burned clients and never wrote a line of launchable code for them, and still include those clients’ names on their homepages.

Point being, it’s all bullshit out there. In this biz, being scrupulously honest about your bona fides is a far greater liability than being inexperienced or having huge gaps in your portfolio.

I lie like hell to my clients all day long. I also deliver them good work on time and hope that on balance, it’s at least a wash, karmically-speaking.

When in doubt, I remember the wise counsel of Memphis Bleek:



... & then I don't worry about it too much.]

Anyway—I suggest you ignore this step until you secure one sit down meeting. Until then, it will only be a waste of time and money. If a potential client asks for work samples over the phone, say you’ll pull together some samples and send them after the call.

*Not because it prevents you from building a decent website. Open-source CMSs, pre-made themes, and a little hired help enable anyone to build a decent website. Nevertheless, rightly or wrongly, anyone paying for a site wants an experienced PM.


3.6 The Meeting

If someone agrees to meet with me, I am really fucking close to selling them a site. Proceed as if they’ve already chosen to buy.

My general sales meeting template is this:

1) Rapport building. If you’ve never met before, try to bullshit with them for 10-15 minutes.

Don’t talk about websites and avoid even talking about their company. If you notice them looking impatient before the 10 minute mark, then get down to business.

This step is so important—probably in any industry, but especially in tech, which is full of Aspy eccentrics. Being likable and pleasant to work is the ultimate leg up. It also makes it harder for them to tell you ‘no’ in the end.

2) Talk about their current web presence. Ask, in more delicate terms, why their current website sucks balls (or why they don’t have one at all).

It’s amazing how many of my clients have a story about a previous web dev company that was inept / unresponsive, they got fed up and let the relationship lapse, a few years passed, and then their website was woefully out of date.

Press them for details on why they’re unhappy with their actual site—are they embarrassed to show it to clients? Is it hard-coded and difficult for them to update? Is it on some proprietary hosting / CMS system that costs $700 a year?

Figure this stuff out and remember it.

3) Explain how you will solve all these problems.

You will respond to all their emails in 15 minutes or less. You will set them up with a hosting account that costs $3.99/mo. You will give them a WordPress backend that a chimp could navigate. You will give them beautiful, au courant design that looks great on desktop, tablets, and smartphones.

4) Talk about their wishes and requirements.

Some clients will have no trouble telling you what they want. That’s helpful; the challenge in those cases is identifying requirements that are beyond the client’s budget or your capacities.

Other clients (especially low-budget clients) will need you to tell them what they want. That’s why I suggest coming into the meeting with a list of page templates and some questions about each. Here’s a standard list of templates and common questions:

Homepage
—What do they want as the centerpiece of their homepage: their logo, a recent blog post, and featured portfolio piece? Slider with links to internal pages?
—What text (if any) do they want on the homepage?
—What internal content would they want featured on their homepage? A widget that pulls recent blog posts? ‘Employee of the Month’? A widget to feature recent deals?

Blog
—Would they use a blog?
—How frequently would they post?
—Would blog posts be text, images, both?

Portfolio Page
(Most business websites have a portfolio page of some sort)
—What would they include in their portfolio?
—What’s the balance of image / text in their portfolio content?
—Could they put all their portfolio pieces on one page? Or will they need a ‘Listing’ page to show everything, and ‘Detail’ page for extended info on individual items?
—How often will they add new portfolio items? (To suss out how easy updating the portfolio should be for them.)

Basic Internal Page
(For those not versed in this: this is a simple page with headline / title, and a rich-content area; most often used for About pages, company histories, Terms of Use, etc)
—What would they put on their Basic Internal Page? Anything that a WYSIWYG editor and rich content box couldn’t easily accommodate?

Contact Form
—Do they want a contact form?
—Would they need anything beyond standard contact form fields: name, email address, nature of inquiry drop down box, comment field?

A lot of low-budget client just want a fucking website. Don’t annoy them with all of these questions if it’s clear they haven’t thought about this stuff and would prefer you take control and come back in a month with something that looks reasonably professional.

Instead, pick a few big questions—what they want on the homepage, whether they would use a blog—offer a couple sensible suggestions, and tell them you’ll take it from there.

5) Budget. I always ask about budget during sales meetings. If I’m lucky, I get an actual number. More often, the client will say, “I’m not sure, what do you think [the website we’ve just discussed] will cost?”

The appropriate answer is some variation on, “I have to sit down and look over the details we’ve discussed. But based on my experience, a very preliminary estimate is somewhere between $X and $Y thousand,” — where $Y is a number substantially higher than you have any expectation of charging.

Odds are they’ll flinch at that. If so, tell them there is a ton of flexibility in price based on final design and feature set, and you’ll help them find an acceptable balance between features, design, and cost.

Then, come back and ask what part of your range they’re comfortable with. At that point, they’ll give you a number. Unless it’s hopelessly low, smile and tell them Awesome, let’s see what we can do with that.

6) Goodbye. Price range & client expectations in hand, tell them you’ll review the details and put together a ‘ballpark’ proposal.

Tell them to expect it in three days; turn it around in <24 hours. (More on this later—beating deadlines is a big part of being a good PM.)


3.7 Creating the proposal (AKA contract)

You should create the contract in two steps:

1) the ballpark proposal
2) the final document

There’s tons more to say about contracts than I’m gonna cover in this thread. Here are the broad strokes of what your two documents should include:

Ballpark
—Intro: 1-3 paragraph overview of project goals, including a note that this is a non-binding ballpark and ‘intended as a discussion document to define scope and project goals.’ (There’s some exact language for you to jack.)

—Services overview: A bulleted list of all page templates, all elements in each template (e.g. photo slider, sidebar, rich text body content area, photo gallery w/ lightbox features, Constant Contact widget, contact form with the following fields…), and all elements that the client will be able to edit via the CMS (if any).

For clarity, I sometimes break this into two sections: Frontend, which describes the templates and features / design elements, and Backend, which describes what’s editable via the CMS.

For CYA purposes, these lists should be absolutely as detailed as possible. Based on what you know of the client, choose a CMS & theme and carefully investigate what’s possible within it. Then write your contract accordingly.

—Technical details: Will the site be responsive? How many breakpoints? Which browsers & versions will it be compatible with? Which CMS are you using? How will SEO be addressed, if at all?

If the answer to any of these questions is, “it won’t be responsive / SEO’d / compatible with IE 8” you should explicitly say so.

—Not included: What services are you NOT providing? Give a bulleted list.

Likely candidates: Copywriting, design / styling beyond the chosen theme’s default options, custom photography, stock photography selection, web hosting, non-bug changes or fixes after site launch.

Also stipulate that the client, not you, is responsible for 3rd party fees—font licensing, web hosting, and stock photography fees being the big ones there.

—Hours limit: For small projects (<$5k) I set a limit on the hours I’ll spend, so that clients understand there’s a limit on changes and revisions they can request. My goal is at least $90/hr. Breaking in, you should probably bend on that number.

Instead, get a sense of A) how soon the client wants this project done, and B) how many hours you/your team can devote to it per week, then set your hours limit accordingly.

—Pricing: For the ballpark: give a range! I’ll delve more into pricing later. If you believe you can handle all the work, then it’s simply a matter of deciding what price makes this project worth your time.

If you think you’ll need help from a hired developer or designer, then you need to figure in some of their time. Get a written estimate from them and bake that into the price.

Then inflate your baseline price 25-30% to get the range you’ll negotiate within.

When submitting the ballpark, set up phone call to discuss with the client. Use that call to discuss the templates, features, and functionality you’ve included, and to temperature check your price.

As much as possible, you should finalize everything during that call. You may have to submit a couple version of the ballpark before all is set.

Then you create your…

Final Contract, which includes:
—Intro (same as before, minus ballpark language)
—Services (same as before)
—Technical details (same as before)
—Not included (same as before)
—Hours limit (same as before)
—Pricing (fixed price agreed upon while negotiating ballpark; include a payment structure with 2-3 milestones, the first being the contract signing)
—Signature space

Unfortunately, the best description of a contract that I can provide is nowhere near as useful as a real example. Sometime later this week, I’ll strip one down to the general language I use and post a PDF for you to work from.


3.8 Repeat, repeat, repeat

Potential clients flake. Hot leads lose interest. 90% of the way through the process, they decide they’d rather have their nephew build the site. Or that they can only afford $500. Or they get swamped with other work and stop responding.

You’ll follow up every week or two. That’s still no guarantee you’ll get the job.

Keep at it. Perseverance at this is richly rewarded, IME.


3.9 General Principles

Sell to businesses, and present your service / product as a wise business decision. Show them how money invested in a website is repaid, then doubled or tripled.

The single most powerful sales technique, I’ve found, is comparing [the price of a website] to [the value of a single sale for your client]. If the website pays for itself by generating one or two sales, it's a no-brainer.

Remember: In the client’s eyes, your value prop is not that you’re a brilliant web designer / developer. It's that you can create and launch a website. Although that’s easy these days, between WordPress / Squarespace / Magento etc, many people don’t realize that.

Or they’re intimidated by the idea of choosing a host, choosing a CMS, choosing theme, learning the minimal HTML/CSS required, inserting content, launching and managing the thing.

Or it’s simply not a prudent use of their time to handle all of that, and they’d rather farm it out—even at a cost of several thousand dollars.

Don’t bother with RFPs. To start, your sole competition should be the client’s inclination to not spend the money and not go through with the project.

You defeat those inclinations by convincing the client that by not hiring you, they are—in the long run—leaving money on the table.

Keep it simple. Understand what the major CMSs are capable of out-of-the-box, then sell those default capabilities to clients.

Don’t promise or agree to anything beyond them. As long as you’re only working with default options and light HTML / CSS styling, you can do all the work yourself.

Go through the process a few times and get a handle on what’s involved. Then start seeking more complicated projects that require hiring devs, and allow you to charge accordingly higher prices.

My second and third projects I did 95% on my own, with only light support from my developer friend to vet my work and assist with launch. That was great training to eventually land larger jobs, do solid work on them, and give the clients excellent service from sales to launch.


3.10 Thinking short term & long term

Keep at it and you’ll hit your stride on sales.

You’ll develop an instinct for which clients are likely to bite.

If you’re targeting the right clients and giving them good work, they will refer you to friends and colleagues, which will give you a passive sales pipeline.

That’s all wonderful, except it won’t necessarily advance your business. You’ll get leads on a lot of jobs that very closely resemble the jobs you already handled, and they’ll bring you more jobs just like those, and more & more… etc.

I didn’t appreciate this at the time, but it was blessing that I started this business while working another job full-time.

That gave me freedom to walk away from jobs that were too similar to work I’d already done.

Instead, I waited for jobs that would extend my range in some interesting way.

The upshot was that after 8–10 completed jobs, I had 7–8 portfolio pieces that were substantially different and included some ‘hook’—a novel Magento product page; a WordPress site for a small journal with a high-concept homepage layout and a cool custom widget for displaying back issues; a Drupal site with a redesigned & streamlined Admin control panel.

The price & complexity of my projects steadily increased. That wasn’t part of some grand plan, though if I’d been smarter and more methodical, it would would’ve been.

In a sense, that put me ahead of established shops with larger portfolios full nearly-identical sites. My shop’s reputation and salability to clients grew by leaps and bounds, even while revenue growth was a bit slower.

It’s hard to walk away from projects and guaranteed money, and you may not have that option for very practical reasons.

Just keep in mind that there’s an opportunity cost to accepting a project that will net you $50 / hour: It means you can’t find a project that pays $60 / hour.

Think about the long-term. Don’t undervalue your time or expertise.

####

Again, glad you guys are finding this helpful. Don't worry about me petering out—I'm still at it, but writing posts with enough detail to be useful takes me a minute.

[Saladin]

Awesome post. Especially the specifics about the proposal.

One thing to keep in mind is you have to have a solid team if you're not creative/technical. I suck at judging aesthetics/coding so I have a couple of very solid designers/developers in India who have been doing good work for me. I also know some solid Western designers if I need higher end stuff for a client.

Remember that you can also use their portofolios as long as you remove any branding(i.e made by x company). That is perfectly fine to do because that's the quality your client will be getting anyways. Right now I'm creating subcontractor contracts for my guys.

In terms of clients, one thing that rings true is that all the richest/most successful people in a city know each other so its a good idea to be part of that network. The importance of being dressed fly cannot be overstated. In business the way you dress, speak, and come across is huge. Always be custom suited up.

A few book recommendations-

Winning through Intimidation- Excellent book on negotiations, sales and a must read. I cannot recommend this enough as it will help you when you deal with a big player that tries to intimidate you into lower prices. Its fun to read too.

Getting to Yes- Great book on negotiation. This is focused at win-win solutions, as well as creativity.

How to Win Friends and Influence People- Great book on how to deal with people.

[LouieG]

torontokid Wrote:

Why do you do hourly rates instead of fixed rates. How do you justify hourly rates?

Nearly all my projects are flat priced (meaning we agree on a number and that’s all my company gets, unless the client decides to expand scope). I find the flat price by assigning an hourly rate to my contractors’ work, estimating how many hours they’ll spend on the project, and multiplying that out.

Twice, I had a client come to me without a set budget and without a clear scope. In those cases I insisted on billing hourly against a monthly retainer. But generally clients require flat pricing.

And, even hourly clients want (understandably) hours estimates for each deliverable. Blowing those estimates will tank a client relationship, fast.

Earlier this year I had a messy breakup with an hourly client due poor estimates on my part, among other things.

Pricing really deserves a post of its own—gonna add that to the list.

torontokid Wrote:

Also, do you have the ability to be location independent at all?

I did this for ~10 months from Malaysia, working almost exclusively with American clients.

But not all clients area equal. I have clients now who expect regular, in-person meetings. Though it’s a time sink and ties me to NYC, they pay rates that justify that expectation.

I do have the flexibility to take lengthy ‘working holidays.’ All told, I’ve spent more than a month abroad this year.

Hotwheels Wrote:

What are JPG's and PSD's?

Image files. JPG—jpegs—I’m sure you’ve heard of.

PSDs are Photoshop files. Developers can open them and quickly get precise information on things like color, spacing, and dimensions of elements.

If I'm doing only design for a client (no dev), my final deliverable will be PSD files. Until that point, I would only show them JPGs.

saeta119 Wrote:

I can't see how you could have a full time job and doing this on the side.

Now, I couldn’t.

At the start, my project load was much less. I worked my full-time gig during Malaysian business hours and then handled this at night, during U.S. business hours.

saeta119 Wrote:

Also, most of your clients you meet them in person? How's your experience with clients in other countries? say you found them on elance, etc?

I see no reason you couldn’t work with clients in other countries. It might make meeting them and cutting a deal harder.

The main drawback is once you reach a certain price point, clients will start to expect at least some face time. Rightly so—bigger clients will have multiple stakeholders involved in decisions, and it’s hard to a have productive conference call with 5+ participants on the line.

I don’t use eLance. My understanding is the rates are shit. Tbh, I’ve never even looked into it.

Brisey Wrote:

Did you study or do any courses on stuff like this prior to getting in to it?

There are a few project management certifications. I believe the most common is the PMP.

I don’t have one and would never consider getting one. None of my clients would give a shit and, by now, my on-the-job training is far beyond anything a program would teach me.

I suspect it’s much more valuable if you want to PM in-house.

Not to open a whole ‘nother can of worms… but I have a liberal arts degree—English + history major—and think it’s been immensely helpful. Suck it, Aaron Clarey.

Frex, client meetings are nothing but broad, free-flowing discussions, very much like those I had during four years of history seminars.

Writing well; distilling complex ideas into simple sentences; listening to someone else’s idea and then expanding upon it, extemporaneously and on the spot—i.e., the things you practice as a liberal arts major—are not worthless skills.

You just have to leverage them to valuable ends.

bojangles Wrote:

I've applied to a few contracts but no luck, but it be better for me to spend some money creating a website and say that I worked on building that digital project?

My advice, as detailed above, is to put together a simple, quick-n-dirty portfolio. Do this as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Use that to impress low budget clients and get their business. Build them good websites, then go out and find clients with slightly higher budgets.

Build them good websites, increase your rates, and repeat.

There are alternative routes. Getting agency experience will only help you. But based only on personal experience, I don’t think it’s strictly necessary.

VincentVinturi Wrote:

What are you thoughts on the potential to sell your business, passive income potential, hiring out managers and payroll and basically taking yourself out of the picture with this business model so you own it but don't have to juggle it?

I can’t imagine anyone buying my business except in an acqui-hire situation. For now, I am the business… man. So while I expect I could find a buyer for my rolodex, current clients, and contractors, the price would be pennies on the dollar compared to what they are worth to me if I continue running the show.

Hiring managers is a more realistic way to step aside without demolishing the value of the company. I know of a couple dev shops where the founder still owns the place and is uninvolved, day-to-day.

Personally, my ambition—and I’ll say more about this later—is reaching a point where my expertise and reputation are such that an hour of my shop’s time is extremely valuable and salable at a massive markup.

That’s why I’m always shooting for more complex jobs, with cooler designs and novel UX/UI features or strategy innovations. I want to eventually be regarded as a guy who can design and build a site that few other shops could pull off.

It’s a long term plan, but if I continue down that road, I can envision a point where I make excellent money with a minimal project load, and only accept clients who want to do innovative and interesting work.

Btw, VV— really enjoy your posts on the forum.

kaka Wrote:

Do you think its wise to spend my time learning cs6? … I just figured that it would be good to know at least the foundations of the systems used. Or spend my time trying to get clients and hire people to make the websites?

Definitely—anything you learn will be useful.

My point is, don’t let learning get in the way of selling. If you’re an Adobe master, you will still have to prove that to people by finding clients, delivering great designs, and then seeing them through to launch. Get that process underway now.

If you’re interested in designing—which I totally understand; I've played around with Illustrator and love it—then develop those skills concurrently. By the time you’re getting good, you’ll already have a roster of clients ready to pay for your design work.

2014 Wrote:

As far as I could tell, anyone could do this... unless there is a hidden barrier to entry I can't see?

Oh yeah. The greatest barrier to entry of all: You gotta actually sack up, approach clients, and convince them to pay you.

Most people won't ever do that; most people will think about it for a minute, then go to the fridge and microwave another plate of frozen taquitos.

Then at the higher levels, you gotta approach clients and have the expertise to provide good work and good client service.

The pool of shops that can do both is tiny.

The pool of clients who hate their web dev shop and want to find someone good is—from what I’ve seen—boundless.

To my mind, there are many uncertainties about the future of web design and development. The possibility that the field might become over saturated with quality competition is nowhere among them.

[Saladin]

(11-13-2013 01:39 AM)LouieG Wrote:  

Nearly all my projects are flat priced (meaning we agree on a number and that’s all my company gets, unless the client decides to expand scope). I find the flat price by assigning an hourly rate to my contractors’ work, estimating how many hours they’ll spend on the project, and multiplying that out.

Twice, I had a client come to me without a set budget and without a clear scope. In those cases I insisted on billing hourly against a monthly retainer. But generally clients require flat pricing.

And, even hourly clients want (understandably) hours estimates for each deliverable. Blowing those estimates will tank a client relationship, fast.

Earlier this year I had a messy breakup with an hourly client due poor estimates on my part, among other things.

Pricing really deserves a post of its own—gonna add that to the list.

I did this for ~10 months from Malaysia, working almost exclusively with American clients.

But not all clients area equal. I have clients now who expect regular, in-person meetings. Though it’s a time sink and ties me to NYC, they pay rates that justify that expectation.

I do have the flexibility to take lengthy ‘working holidays.’ All told, I’ve spent more than a month abroad this year.

Thanks for the reply.

I'll try out both hourly and fixed pricing. I can see how there can be errors in estimation on how long a project can take. I'm guessing you've had at least one situation where you barely made anything due to a project taking longer than expected.

You did mention some dev houses where the owners aren't very involved with the day to day of things. Is that your long term goal?

Long term we want to build our agency up and focus on other business ventures while that runs relatively hassle free. I'm sure this can be done by hiring proper managers as well as tight systems creation. I know of some large SEO agencies that are present in multiple cities.