Have you seen the 2016 movie The Founder? Meet Ray Croc, the man who turned McDonald’s into a fast food giant in the United States.
- Why Process?
- 1. A Sales Process to Keep Cash Flow Coming
- 2. A Client Onboarding Process to Build Trust
- 3. A Project Management Process to Get the Job Done
- 4. A Hosting Process to Manage All of Your Client Sites
- 5. An Invoicing Process to Get Paid
- 6. A Recruiting Process to Find the Right Talent
- Final Thoughts
- FAQs
While he may not be the most perfect business model (spoiler: the biopic claims he practically stole McDonald’s from its original founders), one thing is for sure:
None of their successes would have been possible without the right processes. Turning a popular burger stand into a well oiled machine able to churn burgers faster than anyone else in the world.
Process.
It’s what revolutionized every industry, not just the restaurant industry.
Without a watertight process, Henry Ford would never have built his industrial empire and Arianna Huffington wouldn’t have revolutionized journalism.
Process.
If you want to grow your web design business beyond your own means, you need solid processes. In this article, I’ll share how I scaled my website design business using key processes to grow sustainably.
Simply put, a process is just a way to accomplish a certain task. In a web design business, you might have processes that explain what to do when:
- A client calls you
- You start running out of clients
- A deadline is approaching
- You finish a project
…and hundreds of other things.
Why Process?
Without process, you have to reinvent the wheel every time a common situation arises.
That wastes time, effort, and money. And it slows down the growth of your business.
So today, I want to share with you some of the most critical processes that I believe web design businesses should focus on to grow and succeed. These are the exact strategies behind how I scaled my website design business effectively.
They are below:
1. A Sales Process to Keep Cash Flow Coming
Without positive cash flow, you don’t have a business on your hands; you have a very expensive hobby.
That means your most critical process to growing your web design business may be finding web design clients.
That means working on your sales process.
Selling haphazardly or randomly won’t help your business grow. Word of mouth referrals that may or may not continue next month is risky.
Instead, you need to develop a process to sell your services on an ongoing basis. It can be as simple as just finding time on your calendar each day to make sales calls to the your contacts via email or research job openings. You can get much more sophisticated by hiring a salesperson or using automation software like Mailshake or Reply.io to amplify your sales efforts. Many web design agencies have also found great success with sales funnel software. It’s worth trying one out to see what works best for your business.
A robust sales process was essential in how I scaled my website design business, ensuring consistent cash flow and steady growth.
2. A Client Onboarding Process to Build Trust
Once you have a steady stream of sales efforts, it’s important to nurture every prospect that comes your way.
Perhaps the most critical moment in the customer journey is the time between agreeing to do business and signing a contract or writing a check.
At such times, you need to have a solid process in place to build trust in your client and show them that they made the right decision in hiring you. Building trust played a key role in how I scaled my website design business, starting with effective onboarding practices.
You can build trust in a number of ways, including:
- Taking time to respond positively and promptly to emails, or phone calls.
- Responding positively to questions without getting irritated.
- Asking the right questions to move the project forward.
It’s about the many processes that make up your web design project. Describing timelines, deadlines, and other crucial matters. This can be as simple as sending an onboarding document template with some simple customizations. A well thought out document or video can help customers feel comfortable and hopefully manage their expectations. You can take it a step further by hiring an onboarding specialist to create a process or by using customer onboarding software.
3. A Project Management Process to Get the Job Done
Of course, once you’ve landed web design clients through a sales process and successfully onboarded them, the next big thing is completing the work you’ve accepted.
To do this, you’ll need to focus on a project management process that helps you move smoothly from start to finish.
A strong project management strategy was another pillar of how I scaled my website design business, enabling me to deliver quality work on time.
This process might include:
- How you’ll communicate with your clients (you can use a CRM)
- How you’ll gather the resources needed to create your site, such as text, photos, branding, etc. (you could use something like ContentSnare)
- How you’ll collect and process the feedback you receive from your clients (Responsely would be helpful here)
- How to track milestones, due dates, change orders, and all the millions of details that go into a web design project.
It can be easy to waste time trying to find the right software to solve your problem. There are literally hundreds of options.
And while it’s a great idea to use software to manage your projects, you may find it easier to start with a less technical approach to understand how your own systems work and the way you think.
From there, you can find the best software for your needs. Too often, we find shiny new software and then try to adapt our processes to what technology offers.
4. A Hosting Process to Manage All of Your Client Sites
As you start getting more web design projects, things can quickly start to get out of hand in terms of juggling multiple projects and keeping each client happy with the current state of their site.
You can avoid a lot of headaches by creating a process to manage the hosting and management of all of your client sites.
Creating a hosting process was yet another important step in how I scaled my website design business.
WP Engine is a great solution for this. We’ll help you perform regular backups, forward monthly invoices to your clients, and collaborate with others on your team (see point 6).
If you’re still working on client websites on twenty different hosts, all with different passwords and frustrating login requirements, you should give WP Engine a try.
Either way, you need a system to manage your sites on autopilot so you can focus on selling, designing, and running your business.
5. An Invoicing Process to Get Paid
There’s an argument for getting paid before or after your work is completed.
Regardless, you need a solid system to help you get paid at the right stages of your web design project.
A reliable invoicing process ensured that I always got paid on time, a key aspect of how I scaled my website design business sustainably.
It can be as simple as putting together a checklist of things you do every time you begin or end a project.
There are invoicing software available which you can use to automate invoicing, tracking and payment processing.
6. A Recruiting Process to Find the Right Talent
Once all of these processes are working properly, you can expect to receive more web design work than you can handle on your own each month.
At this point, you’ll need a process to find and hire talented web designers.
Recruiting the right talent was crucial in how I scaled my website design business and built a team that shared my vision.
To get started, you may want to post a quality job posting on a web design job board. But if you’re serious about finding the right talent, you can also try using a service like ZipRecruiter, which will distribute your job posting to over 100 of the top online job boards.
Once you have candidates, you need a good process to schedule, interview, make an offer, and hire them.
You can choose to start by hiring only contractors or hire full-time employees. However, I’d still recommend using something like Gusto to onboard new employees and handle their paychecks and tax documents.
You’ll also want an organizational chart early on so you and your team understand exactly how your business is organized. You can’t wait until you have 10, 50, or 100 people working on your team to figure out who reports to whom and has what responsibilities.
Start simple. Start now. Grow on the fly.
If you want to master business processes, you should start with the most critical. Grow and start simple with the most basic processes and continue to grow until you’re doing more complex processes.
Most importantly, start now. It’s much easier to create, document, and improve processes along the way than it is once you have a small team operating on a daily basis.
Processes are probably your best investment in your web design business apart from human capital.
Final Thoughts
If you want to master business processes, you should start with the most critical. Grow and start simple with the most basic processes and continue to grow until you’re doing more complex processes. Most importantly, start now. It’s much easier to create, document, and improve processes along the way than it is once you have a small team operating on a daily basis.
Processes are probably your best investment in your web design business apart from human capital. These were the foundations of how I scaled my website design business. Start building yours today and see how far you can go.
