Secrets to Running a Successful Web Design Agency in 2024

today we're going to talk about how I run my agency and the process that I use to ensure that all my clients are always satisfied and come back for more now it's taking me over 6 years of freelancing and mistakes to create this method So today we're going to cover the nstep process that I use in my projects so you guys can skip all of the time and money it took me to get here now the first thing that has to happen is going to be lead generation now lead generation happens in two ways in

my Agency number one which is the best way is going to be referring clients now this happens organically when a client is Happy they'll tell their buddies about it their other business business owners about us and then we get more clients through that way now the second way that we're going to generate leads is going to be through this YouTube channel now creating content for over 3 years of web design is going to generate some sort of leads for web design now before starting YouTube I didn't have that many leads so creating something like this

has help me generate that amount of leads now when we generate this lead clients go directly through an email form now this email form is found on our website and we found that doing this helps save us a lot of time clients can add their details directly to the form including the their pricing their deadlines their expectations how many things that they need if they need web app design development writing whatever they need they put it directly on the form and this helps us vet that the client is worth our time and also that we're

a good fit now this has helped to save a lot of time a lot of back and forth a lot of unnecessary meetings just having this very simple form on our site now the second thing that happens after the client comes through the door is and we make sure that okay this is within our budget range this makes sense we have that very first call with the client and the project managers now when this happens we have a general understanding of how long a project should take based on our previous experience now if the client

says I have 6 weeks to do this massive massive project then we're say okay then it's going to be a lot more money than you have available so that's something that we need to know with our past experience if it can match our expertise or not now on this very first call we're always talking about the client's needs now talking about the client's needs is going to be the most important thing of the entire call it's the reason why you're there so make sure that you're always listening to what they have to say next up

the second most important thing is going to be talking about deadlines cont contracts and money now a lot of people don't talk about all three of those or even any of those but that's just what I like to do with my call to give myself some peace of mind and also the client if the client knows directly coming into to the next couple meetings that this is what they should expect that this is the kind of price range that we are thinking about then there are a lot more chill about it and they're not worried

that we're going to shove a $50,000 bid in their face and they say okay well we can't afford that it's better to get the pricing the budget in the very first call out of the way say this is the range that we're thinking are you okay with that is this within your range if they say no no problem there's other methods to go about it but if they say yes then that's it there's no more heartbreak and you just you just get on with it right so the next steps after the call ends is that

we talk with the team make sure that this is something we can do within the time and the money that is available and If that is good because we already talked about the money and the budget then we can say Okay handshake deal we can start with it next week or two weeks whatever the process is like but this is great because we already talked about expectations and we can agree on what we talked about in the first call during another second call or just straight up on email now this is something that we like

to do it's our process it's not necessarily the best process in the world I'm guessing if you guys have any suggestions then please let me know in the comments but once we agreed on everything and we have contracts signed and ready to go we will then accept 50% of the project upfront now this is absolutely critical if we don't receive this money we do not start the project number four is going to be the kickoff call now this is going to be where the client and the team finally meets and they can talk about it's

kind of like a discovery session if you want to call it that this is where we just find all of the things that need to be done so this is one of the most important parts of the entire meeting and we're going to take a look at a real life kickoff call in The Next Step but this is going to be where the project manager can really understand the needs of the client and they can talk to the designers and say okay this is something that we could do couldn't do with the time available okay

so once the project begins we then move on to notion now notion is what we use as a CRM this is what we use to manage all of our projects and I covered this in a previous video I'll link it down below but this is a opsis by the future this is kind of their dashboard that we use to manage clients now here we have an internal view of everything that's going on we have a couple of sentences about the project we have some resources like our figma files and then we have some tasks that

we have already completed are in progress or not started so here we have the meeting notes from our kickoff call we have the date where it took place the objectives we have some notes so this is something really really important that we do and look back on often to see what was talked about and we also have a recording of this so we can always really just make sure that what was being said is actually being worked on right now this is not what we send off to the clients they don't see all of this

what the client sees is their own little dashboard So within the client dashboard we have a very similar view to what we see internally only the difference is that we have this kind of public view of what's going on in the project now this is shared directly to the client as a page so they can always check in and see okay this is what's going on this is what's in progress this is what's not started yet and as as I can see here we're a little bit late on these next VI pages so we'll have

to get started on that but this is what the client sees and this is great because they can see okay this is what's coming up this is kind of what I should be expecting maybe it's a little bit sooner a little bit later so we can play around with that just going to undo what I just the mess that I did there but this is what the client can check in with themselves they don't need to feel like they're bothering us it's just a very simple thing to check in on their own so in terms

of apps that we use in the agency is going to be the very typical ones figma for design always and forever web flow for development if it's a big project framer for a smaller project or just a very simple landing page if it's just maybe even a template it might not even be worth wet flow and then loom for recording so within notion we also have these looms for feedback rounds let me click that so you guys can see what that looks like but here is where I kind of go through the project and I

explain all right this is what's going on right now this is what we're doing so this is a real life project that we've got going on Art typography and I'm just explaining to them the process the buttons everything that we've got going on and then the next few projects that are going to be happening so as the project develops we create more and more looms for them here we only have two because this is a pretty short twomon project as we can see here we only have a couple weeks left so we better get our

skates on and and start working a little bit faster there but that way they can see everything they can see the Looms they can see anything that's ever been posted and in terms of communication we'll either use slack Discord email or in this case we're using teams because that's just what they use directly so we'll go into their company's contact form if that makes sense but step seven is going to be when the client or the project is over we then move on to the retaining Services Mission when the project is over it's not over

it's not over till it's over right but we always try to get clients on a retainer Services that's either for maintenance or either ongoing development or then web design and development so this is something that we started doing recently and it's completely changed the way that we work because now we're not always relying on brand new clients we can use this huge library of past clients that we've worked with to generate more income for ourselves and this is something I recommend every single person watching this to do if you have a list of clients that

you've worked with in the past either on notion on notes even in your email if you haven't sorted that out yet send them a message and saying I am now doing maintenance services if you guys need help ongoing this is my price this is what I do my services blah blah blah let's get on a call if you do that someone's going to say yes and it's going to completely change the way that you work so I recommend that you guys get into that now that we talked about how project management is set up let's

talk about the juicy bits which is going to be money how much money are we making per project what's the average price what's the average income for this stuff now our minimum run is going to be $10,000 per project now there's going to be agencies that say that that is absolutely laughable it's not even worth opening the door for that amount of money and then there's going to be Freelancers and other agencies that say that's my dream project where do I sign well one thing to keep in mind is that there are agencies in every

single metric of the world right there's going to be agencies doing $10 million Web projects web apps and apps and stuff and there's going to be agencies doing $100 websites so whatever right there's there's room to grow there's room to to do whatever I'm happy where we are right now just because this is a brand new agency we only very recently got accepted into the we flow experts program so thumbs up there we haven't even launched it yet so that's kind of where we're starting off at is a 10K minimum now I'm very very happy

with that and I know that there's multiple multiple agencies that have a 200 100K minimum project now I'm going to add some screenshots here of another agency that I really really love that has I think a a similar Max which is around 200k so that's something very interesting to to the think about but there's always room to learn and grow and that's going to be step number nine step number nine is going to be don't ever for the love of God just stay stagnant and say this is good enough I'm just going to sit right

here with my $500 project because I was like that and then I had snapped out of it and said okay I need to keep learning keep growing what we're doing now as an agency is that every two weeks we're meeting with other agency owners and in two weeks we're meeting with an agency owner that is making $200,000 per month with only retainer Services that's kind of their main bulk of projects so that's just something super super valuable the information and knowledge that this person has that can help us grow and maintain our agency is invaluable

so if you can offer something to them and they can offer something to you I recommend that you set up this meeting just a very quick coffee just something simple go ahead and try to set that up so we're almost launching this agency if you have any questions down below about anything about it let me know and I'll try to get to your comment thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you guys on the next one