With about 200 million active websites or more on the internet, proficient web designers are in high demand. Especially with the recent boom of new e-commerce businesses, you’ve must have already experienced an abundance of new inquiries. It may be difficult for you to keep your head above water.
It’s tasking to manage every aspect of a growing web design business on your own. You may find yourself spending a lot of time managing your finances, outsourcing design elements, and onboarding clients that you hardly have any time to do what you do best.
If the above situations ring a bell true to you, it means one thing you’re ready to scale your freelance business and turn it into a well-developed business with several employees and clients.
This post will guide you through the initial steps of growing:
- Define all your processes
The first step a freelancer trying to scale a web design business should take is to put processes in place. Processes help you work more efficiently, guarantee excellent results and save time and money.
You can be paid by outcome, value, and deliverable, this makes processes important. If you have processes in place, it helps you focus on the most important information, tasks, and goals.
You’ll end up getting more referrals and better business if your processes are clear and the customer experience is top notch.
- Finalize client onboarding
One of the initial processes to capitalize on when scaling your web design business is to build and finalize your onboarding process.
Onboarding means giving everything your client needs (information and assets), so you can communicate clearly, hit goals, have an excellent experience, and create a web design that meets expectations.
A typical onboarding tools entails anything from creating a proposal and signing a contract to gathering assets and collecting payment.
- Set up automatic billing
While considering to take on your next client, decide how you are going to move forward with billing.Most especially if you plan on taking multiple clients at once.
In setting up your billing processes, consider the following:
What will your prices be moving forward?
Will you offer any packages?
Do you require payment up front or will you bill at the end?
Will you ask for a deposit?
What invoicing software will you use?
What payment methods will you accept?
- Hire employees or contractors
As soon as you start experiencing more demand for your web design work, it makes sense to build a much bigger team. Hire additional web designers. Depending on how quickly you are growing or plan to grow, you may need to bring on other employees as well.
If you plan to scale your business quickly, it makes sense to hire a professional recruitment team to handle the ins and outs of hiring. - Use project management tools
Project management tools are particularly important if you are managing several clients and multiple projects at a time. Part of setting up processes for a growing business includes investing in a project management tool.
The benefits of a project management are:
Time tracking
Client communication
Asset collection
A singular point of reference for all projects
Automated reminders
Visualizations of projects and project phases (e.g., Gantt charts)
Analytics and reporting
Workflow management
Tracking milestones
Resource capacity management
SaaS integrations
Excellent project management organizes your team, keeps everyone on track, and helps everyone stick to your established processes.
- Own your web hosting
If you’ve been working as a freelance web designer, you might have had a pro hosting account to manage all of your client sites.
If not, it means every time you get a new client, you have to ask for your client’s login information at their respective hosting company. It also means you may have to work with 20+ different hosting accounts.
When you have your own VPS or dedicated server, you and your team members will have full control over client accounts. You can work within a singular system every time you need to design a new website, instead of spending all your time tracking down login information. This will solve headaches, eliminate bottlenecks, and speed up your processes.
- Customize the back end for your clients
Having a VPS or dedicated web hosting, you can officially customize the back end for your clients.
That is, you can create custom post types (CPT) that allow your customers to update their sites, without risking messing up your design.
Customizing the back end for your clients is yet another way to avoid a potential crisis.
Start hosting websites with a VPS or invest in dedicated hosting plan.