How to Grow your Web Design Business Effectively

The solution may sound simple, sell more websites and hire employees to build them.

Well, that’s a way to do it, but is it the best way? Are there any other ways to do it?

The answer to the first question is “it depends” and the second is “yes”.

You will find this helpful if you are a solopreneur, freelancer or you may have a team working for you already and are exploring other ways to grow your business.

In reality, the only way to be able to scale your business is by removing bottle necks.

The main bottle neck by excellence is time. It is the one resource that you can’t get more of.

The key to grow your business is divorcing wealth from time.

To do so, you should create a system that works, even if you don’t put any time into it.

MJ DeMarco on his book The Millionaire Fastlane writes about the 5 types systems, he calls them money trees: rental systems, computer/software systems, content systems, distribution systems and human resources systems.

The simple solution we mentioned before is a human resources system.

I’ve seen many stories of web design agencies that grew up this way.

To do so, they also have a team/person executing a marketing strategy that helps them bring a constant influx of new clients.

These agencies tipically become marketing agencies and offer services such as SEO or Social Media Marketing, that’s generally something they do well, it was what allow them to get enough clients to hire employees in the first place, now they can do it for others.

But if you are like me, you’re probably better at creating awesome websites and not so good at promoting yourself or your services and don’t have enough work to start employing people.

Let’s explore the other ways to scale your business.

Renting equipment is not really something a web designer wants to do.

How about renting space in your server, so people can put their websites there.

That’s right, we are talking about website hosting, it is a rental system.

Warning, this is not a good option for everybody, specialised technical knowledge is necessary and you’ll need to provide support to your clients.

This type of system may or may not be for you, but even if it isn’t, there is nothing stopping you from making some money from it.

There are companies that pay recurring commissions in their website hosting affiliate programs.

Kinsta in the US or 8 Web Design in Australia are great options.

As a web designer, it’s hard to imagine a distribution system.

The best example of a distribution system in our field is Envato Market. Where template/theme creators can sell their creations.

Uber, AirBnB and Amazon are just some of the most well known businesses of this kind.

You may have the ability to build a website to connect sellers and buyers.

If you have a killer idea, as a web designer you have an unfair advantage to be the creator of the next “AirBnB of [blank]”.

Youtube channels, blogs, courses, newsletters, podcasts are great examples of content systems.

As a web designer, you could start one of these.

Becoming a successful content creator is not easy, there is a lot of competition and people’s attention is becoming a more and more scarse resource these days.

That’s why when it comes to content systems, I have a hybrid approach:

Use content systems to help you promote your other services/products.

If you happen to do great and this system may become your main thing, but if not, you are still getting the benefits of a small audience.

There are plenty of stories out there about web designers creating content systems.

Kevin Powell‘s story is a great example, not only because he has a successful Youtube Channel, but also because he has courses to teach CSS.

Two different content systems that support each other, needless to say, that’s Kev’s main activity now.

I’ve left this type of system last, because that’s the route I’ve chosen.

Out of all types of systems mentioned, it is the most interesting to me because the Internet has made more millionaires in 10 years than there were in the previous century.

Also, once a software is built, they can be run with very little maintenance.

As a web designer, the obvious place to start is by building an online application of some sort.

The most common way to monetise an online application is via subscription, making it a rental system as well.

At Koala Widgets, we build software systems in the form of Widgets that people can embed in their websites.

Our clients pay a subscription and they get something that attracts visitors to their websites.

After the widget is built, we can have 1, 10, a thousand or a million users and the work won’t change much, it’s very scalable.

I hope this article gives you an overview of the different ways to grow your web design business.

I know, in some cases, it means changing the business model.

BTW, if you haven’t read my previous article where I explain why Web Design is a bad business model, you may want to check it out.