I want to start a web development company

There's so much competition you are facing. Coming to a point where there's more engineers than projects to engineer. What makes you special? Think about that first.

My suggestion is to get friendly with a local company that makes business and church signs, for a few reasons:

1. If they are spending good money on signs, they have a decent budget.

2. Your contact in the sign company can find out if they have a website, and if they don't, they can find out why they don't. It can help you decide if you want to try and get them as a client ("I know we need one, but we aren't sure who to hire.") or not ("Those newfangled online doodads are a waste of money!").

3. Edited to add: New businesses need signs, and they order signs weeks or months before they open their doors, so you'd get to them before anyone else would be able to knock on their door.

Obviously, they would need to be confident you'd do a good job and wouldn't make them look bad by referring you, but this is my suggestion.

PS: I'm not talking about the yard signs you buy for 10 bucks. I'm talking about the professional store front and free-standing signs businesses and churches have.

My experience is there is everything out there. There are offline businesses without a website that do want one and are willing to pay for it and there are others that either don't want a website or only want a free one.

I have experienced everything mentioned above! I have had customers who had a budget, were willing and able to pay for a website - some of them are wonderful customers and others were customers from hell.

The offline prospects that didn't want a website were ones who had plenty of customers and had no need for additional marketing. One example was a chiropractor. Otherwise, all offline prospects we have spoken to knew they needed a website. I'm sure there may be some out there that may not know this, but I haven't found any like that.

You may think that if someone has a website already, why would they want a different one? The main two reasons I've run into are 1) they wanted a newer, more modern website and 2) they didn't like their current webmaster. I got numerous new customers from the second reason as they said they got very slow support (e.g., 4 weeks to return an email) or the webmaster didn't care about them or understand their business.

Do be ready to have some customers who are wonderful and others who are overly demanding. Make sure you are clear about specifically what you are offering as some people will ask for too much. If you have your boundaries clear before they purchase, it works very well.

Good luck!

Hi,

The way you've worded your question makes it difficult to understand. Ultimately, there are several ways to acquire new clients/customers. There are others here more qualified to answer this in the SEO/Offline/Client Services niche than I am, but I'll just jot down a few anyway. I've only done cold calling so far and that was to a warm market.

One thing I will say is that you should offer services that you can continue to bill for each month on the backend. That way you'll have a growing monthly income that you'll be able to count on instead of constantly having to find new customers each month. That sucks. Trust me, I know.

Cold calling - just pick up the phone and dial.

Networking events - not my thing but it works for some people

Referrals - I've heard of many people getting referrals from satisfied customers. Do a great job and you may, too.

Paid Ads (Online) - Facebook, Adwords, Bing, Craigslist, etc. I haven't done this yet but it's definitely going to happen soon. There may be ezines (online magazines, newsletters, etc) that you could also try. You'll need to offer something to get people to sign up to your list and then build a relationship and sell to them in a follow-up sequence.

Paid Advertising (Offline) - I've heard of some people having great success with direct mail. That's also something I'll be doing very soon. Maybe after next week.

Also, there are other offline magazines and publications you could try. I'd look for magazines related to the industry or industries I was targeting and look for related service ads. Try to find back issues and see if the same ad(s) were there 3, 6, 12 months ago, etc. Smart companies don't normally keep paying for ads that aren't converting, nor do they usually pay upfront long term until they've tested it to see if it works. If they've been there long term you might try a similar ad in the same magazine or modify their ad a bit and advertise in a different magazine in the same niche.

Cold emails - I haven't done this yet either, but it's happening soon. Nathan (iamnameless) has a great product on this topic you could check out.

Those are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more. The only way to find out what will work best for you is to pick one and test it. Trial and error.

HTH

Joe

My advice is to stay clear of web design business. Web design and development is one of the worst businesses to get into right now. Specifically web design/dev for small businesses doesnt have a high enough profit margin and very little recurring revenue.

Back in 2014 i made the mistake of entering the website business and within 8 months i was looking for a way out. Now i am backing to seo, ppc and lead gen. I have fewer clients and fewer headaches but at least i can sleep easy knowing that i will be paid every month as long as i deliver. Anyway, here are some of the main problems i faced

a) very competitive. with wordpress, weebly and wix around, you can build a nice looking DIY website for less than $100. It is hard to justify charging even $1000 for a custom website. Then you have very talented freelancers with low overhead and as an agency with full time employees it becomes very difficult to compete.
b) hard to differentiate. Think of any niche and there are a dozen web design agencies for that niche already. Think of a unique offer and there is a dozen web design agencies already doing that.
c) very little to no recurring revenue. Web design and development on its own has very little recurring revenue. At most you can charge management fee but that wont pay your bills. Yes you can upsell ppc and seo but these things require additional human resource as most web developers are shit at SEO. Recurring revenue is what drives business growth else your business will fail within few years.
d) hard to sell. A great website alone will not produce much revenue for a business so it is essentially a sunk cost. They will only make money from the website if they promote it. In fact it would make more sense to give a free website for SEO plan.
e) market saturation. In addition to (a) and (b), this business suffers from market saturation. I wish i realized this 2 years ago but basically a new website lasts at least 1-3 years. This means once a business has a website it will not need a web designer for another 1-3 years! With so many freelancers, design agencies, software for web design fighting over a limited number of businesses in the market for a website at any time, there is very little room for growth so everyone pretty much stays the same. This is why most web designer and agencies are barely surviving.
f) hard to scale. if you are working on the next wix then maybe you can scale. But if you are doing creative/custom web design then you will have a hard time to scale. It easier to scale if you stick to a niche like legal/dental/real estate etc. But even then you will struggle to reach the revenue you desire.

I believe, any business that cannot be scaled to $1MM within 3-5 years max is not worth the hassle. You may have your own target but $1MM is mine.

Now just for comparison, if you sold you $1000 websites, you will need to sell 1000 of them to get to $1MM. Even at $2k per website, you will need to sell 500 units per year or around 40 per month. The problem is that you will have to sell 40 websites every month for as long as you want to make $1MM per year. The bigger you get, the worse it becomes. So if you want to hit $2MM, you need to sell 80 websites every month! This is why big agencies have more sales reps than web designers.

On the other hand, SEO/PPC package of $1000/month would require just 100 clients to get $1MM. This is because these clients will be recurring clients so you wont need to get 50 clients every month. Instead you just continue performing well for your existing clients and keep adding 1 new client per week. By the end of year 1 you will have 40-50 clients and by the end of year 2 at least 80-100. After that you can cruise through life and retire in 10 years. This is the business model i am currently aiming for.

However, you dont have to limit yourself to seo/ppc because there are many other services you can sell to small business for a retainer fee

1) blogging/content marketing services
2) email marketing
3) customer support and live chat for ecommerce
4) conversion optimization
5) lead generation
6) billing and coding to healthcare
7) payroll and accounting
8) SAAS
9) call answering
10) virtual assistant services to realtors

Note that these are the things that a business will need and continue to need as long they are in business. Unlike a website where once it has been developed, they wont need a redesign for 1-3 years. In fact, as a business grows, they will need more marketing, more content, more customer support, more payroll work, more call answering yet still have 1 website for the most part.

I wish i had known this before venturing into web design business because i would have been much ahead by now. However, i think it was still worth it because of the business principles i learned that they dont teach in business school. But i hope you will learn from my experience and avoid web design business.