2 – The Blueprint to Multi-6-Figures as a Freelance Web Designer (Without Burning Out)

What’s up y’all. Welcome to the web design empire where we share stories and strategies to help you build your web design empire from a side gig to multiple six figs, not just one six fig, but multiple. I’m John joined by Kelly here. We’re full time freelance web designers who escapes. The real world broke up with our jobs, our bosses, our cubicles, and our commutes.

And all of our ex girlfriends and boyfriends as well over 15 years ago, and we haven’t looked back. We’re also course creators, web design store owners. Kelly owns some Airbnbs. I’m a touring professional musician. All that to say, we are still building our empires, aren’t we Kelly? Yeah, that’s the dream, right?

That is the dream. That is the dream. It doesn’t always feel like a dream For example, 99 percent of the time it feels like a dream, [00:01:00] but let’s be real Yeah, just yesterday I had to so we’re doing this new website for a client and it’s a custom website Which means I get to work on it.

Yeah, I work on about mmm Um, maybe 10 to 15 percent of our sites per year. We have junior designers that handle most of the sites, and then if a client pays extra for custom level, I step in and bring the big design guns, I guess. I don’t know. But anyway they have a terrible logo.

The logo is worse and can’t redo it. It’s printed. It’s on too many things. And so then when you’re like trying, you can’t have this logo and then everything else vastly different. And the colors aren’t great either. I juice the colors up a little bit, but the colors aren’t that.

Great. And it’s a medical website to beyond all that. It’s a it’s just not fun. It’s not fun. Okay. It’s not fun to work on. And yes, yesterday I was like, okay, this is the day. Today’s the day where I’m going to spend all day on it. And [00:02:00] when I do these custom sites, I only work the homepage up and like a general interior.

And then I pass the rest on to junior designers. So my, I don’t even have that heavy a lift, but I just knew Okay. This is going to take me all day because I’m going to work 30 minutes and I’m going to complain for 30 minutes and then I’m going to work for

30 minutes.

Yeah, those bad logos really just suck the fun out of a project.

That or like when you’re given photos from, someone’s iPhone 2 from, 100 years ago and you’re like, God, really, this is what I have to work with. Thanks. Thanks. Why are you paying for a custom website? Okay. with your wonky logo and photos, but what do you do?

So last week you were about to go on vacation.

Can you vacation with young kids? I don’t know if you can.

No, it’s never that’s the wrong word, but we went camping. Which again is a stretch. I will only exist on a campsite in a camper. And so with a bed. And But you know what’s funny is I feel like we finally [00:03:00] nailed camping with kids.

And it’s funny, we’ve been on this trip, this was the fifth time we’ve been there, and we’ve done it a little different every time. We’ve used an RV, we’ve used a C Class, we’ve used an Airstream pull behind. We rent them all on Outdoorsy. But this time but we’ve been hauling them from Boulder, which sucks, cause it’s far.

It’s like a five, six hour drive. And when you’re hauling, Something, especially with kids, like it’s not what you think, like you think, Oh, I’m in an RV. I’m going to be like, you know, chopping vegetables back there and, playing games with the kids. It ain’t like that. Like you’re just stuck in a seatbelt and it’s loud and it’s

vegetables and vacation.

I don’t know about that. You know what I mean? Like you think you’ll be

like meandering and enjoying yourself in this house on wheels and that’s just not, it’s just, it’s loud. And. bumpy. So anyway so this time I was like, you know what, I’m going to see if they have a camper near the campground.

And not only did they, there weren’t a lot of options in Spearfish, South Dakota, but not only did they, but this was like a delivery only type of situation. [00:04:00] So they hauled it to the campsite, set it all up, like all the pipes and everything, the water, the electrical. And then all we did was just move in and hang out.

And then on the last day, we just. Moved out and left and the guy like tore it all down and hauled it away and I was like nailed it We crushed it plus the insurance is like next to nothing because we weren’t driving it So it was I feel like I need to write a book about how we just totally crushed that but anyway So we had a good weekend and then you were also in South Dakota on some other excursion for band things.

Yeah, I’ll get to that in a second. But when the band owned a bus, we used to own a bus Revo had 12 bunks in it, had a lounge and a back lounge. It was quite the thing. You’ve seen them on the road, I’m sure. Oh yeah. And ours had air rides, so it was pretty nice smooth ride, but it would I remember at night in the bunk.

It would just kind of rock you to sleep. It’s like, yeah, this is great. I slept really well on the bus because

it just Oh, okay. Well, then you had a much better situation than we rented. [00:05:00]

But we used to do There was no smooth

anything.

Before we left the venue it’d be late at night, right?

We’d tear down all the gear, load up the gear. It’d be later, probably 11 o’clock at night. And we would decide, let’s do P90X right outside the bus. Well, we do it right outside the bus. We’d set the laptop on the bus stairs that you go in and we would do it right there. And then if we had to leave and didn’t have enough time, there’s a little ab ripper X add on 15 minutes.

Oh yeah. I used to do that. So we would do that in the aisle of the bus. And if the bus turned, you’d be like, Oh, it’d be like, make it that much harder. Like, Oh, turn. Anyway, yeah, this last weekend we headed up to a festival in South Dakota, got a flat tire in the middle of nowhere on the way out there.

That’s like my worst nightmare. Barely got to this gas station in some small Missouri Valley, Iowa. 30 minutes from the Omaha airport, no Uber would come get us. Long story short this poor guy who Works for his cousin’s towing company because he was like right. Yeah, we were like man Thanks for coming out on a [00:06:00] Saturday on Labor Day weekend.

Wow, that’s incredible. He’s like, well, my cousin owns the company I can’t tell him no Anyway in business So while we were while we were stuck at this gas station for three and a half hours They had a little diner area and I whipped up my laptop and I just got some stuff done And that’s what we do.

That’s the freelance lifestyle, right? You know what’s wild

is on the way to South Dakota, while we were in the car, I got a call, a frantic call from one of my clients. This is sad that it’s a cardiology group and one of the physicians died that morning. And she was like, we got to get something. She was bawling as she should be.

And And and she’s like, we got to get something on the website as soon as possible. I’m like, I’m on it. And I literally did it in the, passenger seat of the car. Cause duty called. But yeah, I think if there’s something that we have nailed it’s like that freelancy kind of summer, doing the summer things while still getting the work in when you need to, but we don’t necessarily have to because we’ve set our businesses up [00:07:00] in a way that.

Has allowed us to do these things. And the topic of the day is, what is it exactly? How to hit multiple six figures as a freelance web designer. And and the short answer is recurring revenue, which we’ll get into. But the long answer is a whole bunch of other stuff that we’ll also get into.

But that’s, what’s kind of allowed us to be able to. Do these trips and work wherever and amongst other things that we’re going to talk about. But yeah, should we get in, should we get into some math? Should we start with some math?

Well, we should, but first of all, I missed my opportunity.

Every time you say recurring revenue, I want to start, I want to start doing that every time. Is that annoying? Well, there’s going to be a lot of ding in the day then maybe not every time, but we’ll just kind of set the tone recurring revenue. I like it. I like it. Well, I’m speaking speaking of summer freelance I actually wrote an entire blog post about it.

So I

know that’s what inspired that. Freelancy summer

vibe. How can someone read this blog post? I’ll tell you go to break into web. com [00:08:00] Break as in like break me a piece of that KitKat bar not break like step on the brakes and hit the resources tab. You’ll see the summer of freelance blog post Yeah.

It’s a good one. But yeah, let’s talk about how to hit multiple figures. Well, how about just hitting one, one six fig? Let’s try that. Right. Right. So

again, we break down the math. We’re not going to get too detailed here but six figures and we’re obviously not talking about expenses or taxes or anything like that.

We’re just talking about sales numbers. So six figures, a hundred K we’re looking at what’s that 8, 300 a month? And so if you just look at that from a freelance web designer perspective without recurring revenue, it’s what, two, three websites a month, right? Depending on what you’re charging, where you’re at which is incredibly doable on, You know, I don’t think anyone would disagree with, Oh that’s impossible.

It’s absolutely possible. John and I have obviously done it. We have many, many students who have done, who can do two to three websites a month. The seven [00:09:00] figures so that’s 200 K that’s looking at 16, 600 a month. Which, Honestly, I don’t

know if I six, the multi six, you said seven, right?

The multi. Oh, that’s a little different on our way, though. We are on our way

to seriously say seven. That’s a bad podcast for you know, 20, 27. But anyway. Multiple six figures. That’s hilarious. Yeah. So that’s doubled over 16, 000 a month. Which honestly I don’t see a way to do that as a freelance web designer without tapping into some sort of recurring revenue source.

Do you want to ding ding that? There it is. And that’s the only way that we’ve done it as well. And so then it becomes more like, well, John and I have hit 10k a month in recurring I think we’re both over 15k at this point. So then it becomes, oh, he’s at 18, I’m not quite at 18.

But then it becomes one to two [00:10:00] websites a month, if even higher end websites. So you don’t even have to do. Websites a month to hit that. So anyway, you can see how it’s very manageable to do once you get your recurring revenue to a point that you don’t have to bust your butt on tons of websites.

Gosh, that was long winded.

Well, just to have, the simple math that actually worked out super well. I was surprised when I did this, I was like, okay, without recurring revenue hitting, hitting six figs, just the a hundred grand. I was like three sites a month. At three K.

At three K. Yeah. That’s 108 grand a year. 108. Okay, cool. Yep. Let’s say for, and that’s 36 sites a year. Let’s just say 36 sites a year, three a month. Three a month, 36, right? Totally doable. Hosting plans at artillery. Our lowest hosting plan is 59. Kelly’s lowest is 79, I believe.

Yeah. For my one page sites, I’ll do 49, but yeah, 79.

Well, I’ll speak to artillery. So our cost on that with, the actual cost of us [00:11:00] paying for the hosting. We have a support gal that’s included. And then we have a little maintenance app that watches all the websites, right. And update someone they need updating and stuff like that.

It’s about nine bucks a month. So we’re left with 50 a month in net revenue, 50 a month in net revenue times your 36 sites per year, 1, Per year that your monthly revenue is going up of MRR. And so guess what? After five years of just doing that, that’s that’s it, nine grand a month, which is 108 grand.

Yeah. Perfect. So then you’re like, Oh, I like that. Your math was much cleaner than that. That just worked out. I was like, what if I just did three sites a month at three K for five years? What would that be? Yeah. Now obviously you’re going to raise your prices. So this is like a.

Super conservative. This is like a worst case. Yeah. Well, as you said let’s say, four years into it. You’re making, almost 8k a month in recurring revenue. You’re going to charge more anyway. And so that’s why instead of doing three sites a month at [00:12:00] 3k, you might only do two at 4, 500 or you might do one at 9k.

You might do one at 9k. Right. I’m good.

And not to mention we have other, maintenance plans as well that go on up. And so most of my clients are on the 129 a month plan. And so that just, that, that makes it go that much quicker. And so should we define like these maintenance plans?

I think it’s pretty well known in the web design industry, but yeah, maintenance plans basically hosting plus, some value add from the web designer, because, we’re not actually, we don’t have. Web servers in our office here we’re, using existing, very well supported hosting companies.

But then the value that we’re adding is the updates that WordPress pushes out, the plugins, the theme updates. I do uptime monitoring. I also do malware scans once a week. Ooh. And so that. Right. It sounds fancy. And and I’m, what people don’t know the clients is that, I’m managing all this from one button, at my [00:13:00] desk that pushes that out to all of my sites.

But they know that the value is there and that if these things aren’t happening, there’s a good chance they’re going to get hacked or the site will go down and no one will know or stuff like that. So the value’s there and that’s, I think that’s. The gist of the maintenance plans. Is there anything else you guys add to yours?

That’s pretty much it. The hosting companies do backups, but we still list that as a service, right?

Like backup. Exactly. We’re backing

up your site. Well, the hosting. Every single day. Yeah, exactly.

And then the other thing is for the higher levels of maintenance plans is I’m incorporating Like the middle one includes an hour of my time each month so that they can send Hey, update this bio or swap this image or add this blog post, whatever.

And a lot of people like having that. Added in there because it’s a discounted rate to them instead of the 90 an hour 100 hour Whatever the client rate is so that’s the maintenance plans it’s funny. I have to mention this. It’s a funny story when I first got to six figures [00:14:00] Well, first of all, I didn’t even know it because I wasn’t tracking my finances or paying attention to them at all.

And so it wasn’t until my accountant was like, Hey Kelly, give me all the numbers. That I was going back through my months and I realized, Oh my God, I did it. I hit six figures. I didn’t even know which is kind of pathetic, But anyway, I remember hitting it and being so excited.

And then my next thought was, Oh my god, I could never hit multi six figures. Like that’s insane. That’s impossible for one person to do without scaling or without bringing on employees or whatever. But I just think it’s really cool that I actually had that I remember that moment having that thought.

And it’s like, Did it. But again, that was when those maintenance plans were just a glimmer in my eye and didn’t know what magic they beheld. So things have changed.

Well, and that’s a big difference between us. And that’s why I tell our web design students and our mastermind students is like, Hey, you’re getting two of us that have built [00:15:00] this thing.

Got to multiple six figures, two different ways. Kelly is a solo freelancer. She manages and she works with all our clients and she hosts all their sites and manages all their support, which you’d think would sound like a lot, but it’s not much. You use a virtual assistant though.

Yeah. A little bit.

I do have a helper for the small edits that clients send in every month, which there’s generally only a handful. But yeah, I have a helper that does that stuff. And I just focus on really web designs. Thanks.

And then I chose, I eventually chose to train a guy up and eventually partner up with him.

And we have, there’s six of us now that work for artillery. But as far as recurring revenue and income, we’re pretty much on the same Yeah. Page. I’d say page for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s definitely a unique perspective that you get. So if you’re looking for coaching, join our mastermind and learn from two sharks.

I say there’s two sharks, not one. There’s two sharks. Well, so we got [00:16:00] hosting and maintenance. That’s the big one. That’s like, right. That’s the main.

And in case we haven’t hit this home enough, I know you have a car analogy for why recurring revenue and web design industry go hand in hand and like why it’s such a good thing.

I do. I do. I do. Oh, I remember, when I’m telling students or convincing people, which we’ll probably have a podcast episode on why. Freelance web design is like the best side gig to grow into a full time gig. The best. Why it’s amazing. But I remember talking about the hosting and maintenance plans and recurrent revenue specifically and how amazing it was.

So during the pandemic, right? We all remember the pandemic. We might not want to, but we all remember it. And I remember telling folks like, man, you got to host and maintain your websites. It’s the best thing. It’s like car insurance is what I said. And they’re like, what, why? I’m like, well, During the pandemic, I knew folks who canceled their gym [00:17:00] memberships.

Right? Because they weren’t going to the gym. They’re working out at home. But you know what they didn’t cancel? They didn’t cancel their car insurance. You needed car insurance. You have to have it. You have to have it. As a grown adult, you just have to have it. 99 percent of grown adults need car insurance.

During the pandemic, I knew some companies that slowed down their marketing efforts. Or they canceled their co working space, right? Or they’re like, we don’t need our co working space for six months or a year. But guess what they didn’t cancel? What didn’t they cancel? They didn’t cancel their web hosting, right?

Cause every website has to be hosted somewhere. Has to. Has to. It’s a requirement. And every now and then I got one this week, I got an email from a client. So we just and I’ll, I guess I’ll get into this too. You can offer website plans to your clients, or you can buy a book of business from someone and take over their website.

So we just did that a couple months ago. We bought 23 sites from someone and we gave them two months free hosting as part of the. Transition. That’s so kind of you. Because the guy before us was like charging like [00:18:00] 29 a month. It was just like, and we’re 59. And so we knew it was going to be a jump for most people.

Hey, to help you help out, we’re going to give you two free months. And so like last month was the first month of here come the bills. Boom. And most of them paid it, but I got a couple that were like, Hey, do we really need this service? And it’s like, if you want your website up and live, you do. Everybody I’ve had

that before, too.

It’s funny. There are clients who just really don’t understand what is this hosting thing and why am I paying it? And it’s like, well, if you want a website that communicates with the internet, uh, yeah, it’s kind of a must. Yeah. So

that’s my analogy on, if you ever get jealous, if you ever get jealous of a insurance salesman who’s got, 5, 000 people insured under him because, oh, and the other reason why it’s like car insurance is it’s a pain to switch your car insurance, isn’t it?

Like you, you don’t want to. You don’t want to you’re like, you know what? It’s fine. It’s cheap. It’s whatever. Sure. I could I’m sure if I [00:19:00] tried I could probably find a better rate, but it’s not worth my time. Well, same thing with hosting. If you’re servicing your clients well, and 59 sure. They might, some of them might wander on GoDaddy and be like, what?

I can host my site for 9 a month. Why are you? Well, that’s when you sell the other features of your plans that we just went through. But the

fact that GoDaddy support is just. Terrible. It’s

garbage.

Oh my God, getting into all the,

all the sounds. So anyway, that’s the other reason why it’s like car insurance is that it’s folks as long as you’re doing not that

car insurance is sexy, but you gotta have it.

So it’s just that’s why it’s such a good analogy anyway. But yeah, as far as additional recruiting revenue. I know that I know that not all web, not all web designers do hosting and or maintenance plans. And those could be separate things, by the way but it’s just nice when they’re all wrapped up with the bow.

It makes things a little simpler. But some other things that we have looked into [00:20:00] and or done ourselves Let’s get into some of those.

You were going to start, you were going to start. And you just saying the hosting and maintenance could be separate things that, that kind of jogged my memory.

So when I first, before I brought Jake on board and I was overwhelmed, I was in the middle of 28 projects and I was just drowning in projects. And I was like, I got to start making monthly. Revenue, but I didn’t want to host because I had tried hosting before and I had a bad experience, which we’ll talk about on the reoccurring hosting website on Valentine’s day.

I was on a date and all my sites went down like 20, some sites. Anyway, that was the straw. I was like, that’s it. No more hosting for me. I’ll just send these folks to a hosting company and I’ll still get paid because they’ll the hosting company I’ll pay you like an affiliate fee one time.

Yeah, right anyway So I started I rolled out a maintenance plan only the maintenance 20. It was 29 a month less than a dollar a day And I bet 80 percent of clients went for it. And so that was a so you don’t have to [00:21:00] host But it’s true And if you don’t like hosting that’s fine. We have some students who don’t want to mess with hosting.

So for our students in break into web, we actually will host the site for them and then charge them a fee, and then they can upcharge that fee to their clients. And so that’s a really nice way for them to make recurring revenue with not even dealing with the hosting. We’ll set up a test site for you.

We’ll launch it for you. Everything. That’s pretty dope.

Yeah. And again, the other thing with break into web, you mentioned like hosting affiliate fees but we, like John and I, as business owners with break into web, we use affiliate fees for, hosting and for Divi, Elegant Themes and Gravity Forms.

There’s a couple other affiliate fees that we, or affiliate links that we use in our program. And so we continue to get money from those each month, which is awesome. That’s not, it’s hard to call that recurring because those are mostly one off Fees, but there are some, I know ConvertKit will have, they have a multi, don’t [00:22:00] they?

Don’t they pay for six months or something? Anyway.

Yeah, and Aweber does ongoing, like I have a couple clients on Aweber. I still get money for it. Nice. Well, yeah, that’s good one.

And some, one of the things I was going to talk about was I used to be a, have a partnership with an SEO company that would pay me like a percentage of their contracts with the clients and for the life of the contract, which was amazing.

I think I got up, I think it was over 2, 000 a month at one point where I did zero and they would just pay me these affiliate fees essentially each month. And it was just the easiest money on the planet. Couple caveats there. One is you cannot partner with companies who are not excellent at what they do.

Because if your client finds out you’re making money off of that relationship, and it’s a garbage person or like a garbage company that does a terrible job first of all, their contract is going to be real short. But second That’s just bad [00:23:00] business. You don’t want to, you don’t want to be involved with that.

So lucky for me, this was a good company. They treated most of my clients great. There were, I think there were a couple issues, but overall it was a good partnership, but then one day they just decided, you know what, we’re not doing that anymore. So I lost all of that recurring revenue just real fast.

So those opportunities can be great. But obviously there’s some, Issues around, around those. The other thing that John and I have done as business owners is we actually went and purchased a subscription based company for Divi plugins and Divi themes. It’s called Superfly.

I’m sure we’ll mention that often. But that has added greatly to our recurring revenue because it is a subscription based model. Almost everyone on Who purchases from the website is either a monthly or an annual member which again, just adds to that recurring revenue, which is awesome.

And there’s no reason we would have purchased this company if that wasn’t already established. So,

and what’s, [00:24:00]

and what’s funny is Like even my husband and I we are looking for investment opportunities. And this is what happens when you have that recurring revenue and you have these revenue streams.

And when it, when it gets to a point where you can be picky about the projects you take on and how often you work it allows you to explore other opportunities. And so my husband and I have gotten into real estate recently. We’re even looking at some other opportunities out there, but if there isn’t like recurring revenue attached to the business model.

We’re not even interested. But yeah, we do have a couple air, well, we just have one Airbnb now we sold one which was a great deal. We’ll go into that. But we still make great, income every single month after off of this vacation rental. So, again, if there ain’t recurring revenue attached to the business plan I’m not interested.

It has changed our lives that much.

Yeah, no it’s it’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for sure. I remember one of the scariest decisions making as a business [00:25:00] owner. When I brought Jake in, he was like, we need to host. And I was like, well, you spearhead. That’s right.

You’re like, no. You had that division, of artillery. But I remember when we Senate, we start, we slowly went from pitching our own hosting, but clients could still select someone else. For with no consequence. And then it was like, pitch our hosting. And if you don’t use our hosting, there’s an extra 600 fee on your website.

Why? Because we have to learn that hosting environment now, which can be different. Not everyone uses control panel anymore. Thank God. C panel. And so now they all have their own little unique way of, getting around their backend. And it was 600 for a while and then we just said, if you’re not going to host with us, we’re not working on your site.

We don’t want it. Yeah. And I remember before making those decisions thinking like, Oh, I don’t know. And now on the other side of that, it was like, I should have done that way sooner. Well,

cause, and generally the clients that are really picky about like where it’s hosted and how it’s handled, it’s those are generally nightmare clients anyway.

Like you want a [00:26:00] partnership with a business owner who. They trust you and they know you’re going to take good care of their stuff. And you don’t want to be nickel and diamond on silly, or you don’t want them caring about how much RAM and giga, whatever is going on. That’s not your job, business owner.

Please let us handle. Yeah. That’s usually a

lower tier of client. Like you graduate. To a different, to a higher tier. Yes. Speaking of hosting, there’s a couple other things that we added about a year ago that are some recurring revenue. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, John. Come on.

Oh, no, not that one. Here we go. We added some premium add ons to our hosting plans now that folks can add on and pay even, Give more money to us every month. And I’ll highlight a couple. One is website speed optimization. So we use this third party called NitroPak and I think they cost 15 bucks a month, but we charge our clients 29 per month.

Cause we, we install it and watch it. We probably have maybe 20 clients on that. And then one that’s been actually [00:27:00] somewhat popular is we do a 19 per month add on for Google search console management.

Oh yeah. See hard pass.

No, because clients get those emails, right?

And like you probably get it too, right? Like your site can’t be indexed or this page can’t be indexed. What’s going on? And they freak out. And so we’re like, Hey, we can take care of these for you. And we actually have our support gals at DNS. Google search console pro and Jake’s all in it, all about it too.

So they, I don’t touch that, but that’s what they do. That’s awesome. And then this one, we don’t have any takers on this one yet. And I might just take it off and do it for free eventually. But the theme that we use Divi rolled out an AI feature and we pay for the AI feature. So there’s a 5 per month AI feature add on if you’re one of our clients and you want us to And you want to turn that feature on for your site.

It’s actually on, it’s actually on already, but they don’t know where to go to use it. And so those are a few there on the hosting side. And then the last one that I had that I haven’t done this yet. So hot tip. [00:28:00] The untested one, but email marketing add ons. So in our break into web design school, we have onboarding emails.

We have potential student emails. We have all different funnels in there, depending on what you choose. It, depends on the emails that you get. For example, we had a mom funnel for a while that if you Landed on our mom or want to be mom’s page and why you should get into web design freelancing as a mom there were specific emails for that for those folks that was started out like hey, hey girl.

Hey mama, whatever Hey girl Different tone different kelly wrote all those emails There was a musician one that there was a musician landing page that I wrote the copy for and stuff like that Well, I thought man, it’d be great. So at artillery If we were hurting for clients which we were not, but if we were starting to, one thing I would implement, and I, we should, anyway, just a matter of time is like a little five email, welcome to artillery series, that prospective clients would get on and [00:29:00] anyone that fills out a contact form would automatically be put on this.

And there’d be a check box, they could opt out, but they’re not going through there. They get on this email and it’s just meet artillery, client testimonials. Here’s a few site launches. We’re super proud of get to know the owners who know, who knows what but just a nice little over the span of two, three weeks, that once they felt that form automatically, they’re going to receive these emails and you don’t have to do anything, and it’s just reinforcing what you’re doing.

And I thought we should just do that for clients. Like we should get our setup first and then be like, Hey, after we sell them the website and everything, and we’re cooking along, it’s going well. Hey, remember that email series you got, you want that for your website?

We can help you write the copy for that. We can set it up for you, pay a little 500 setup fee and then X amount per month to. To have it running. And basically we would sign up for ConvertKit for them and just upcharge that. So that’s something exciting that I’m excited about. Want to get going, it’s something that once that’s turned on and it’s like, okay, if you stop paying for that, it’s going to go away.[00:30:00]

Like I would hate for that for breaking away. We have all those emails in there. If we decided to not use ConvertKit anymore, it would be like, it’d be sad. Cause right now I know when someone signs up, it’s like a two month. Funnel that it’s like, Oh, it’s more than that. You’re going to get 30 some emails.

You’re going to know who we are. You’re going to know who we are until you unsubscribe. So that was the last that I had on other ways to get to multi six figs. I

love it. And there’s, really it’s endless. There’s so many options there. And there’s so many like adjacent industries to web design.

So depending on where you came from or what your background is, like you can get started. Super creative, but yeah finding some sort of value add. That’s a low monthly fee that you can utilize, add on to your services, add that on your maintenance plan or have add ons like John’s company is doing.

Super, super smart. And yeah, if you’re not doing it already, do it. Couple of, okay, now we need to talk about some warnings and mistakes. I already talked about the one, my, my affiliate who grabbed the rug under my feet with my 2k [00:31:00] a month. But there’s another story that, that I went south hard.

And it was because, there’s, I think greedy is probably the best word for it. I got to a point where I was so sick of paying credit card fees. I think it was well over 10, 000 one year. And I was like, I’m done. And so I went down this rabbit hole of trying to find a billing software that would basically Put the fees on the client end as opposed to me and like they, it was all tax appropriate and everything.

Which was hard to find. And so I switched from my beloved fresh books to this other system that was attached to QuickBooks, which I hate. And anyway, I didn’t get paid for two months. It was a complete disaster. And I ended up going back to FreshBooks and thank God I could turn back on every single one of those recurring invoices that already existed and I had deleted.

But anyway, that was a really bad experience. So yeah, make it same. And I know we’ve talked about man, if we ever switched hosting companies, like going through all of those [00:32:00] DNS situations on every single domain would be such a raging nightmare. So yeah, when you do pick a hosting, when you do pick a hosting partner, make sure it’s a really good one.

Because that would be just a terrible experience. Yeah. And the other thing I will say is this is something that I think we’ll get into on another episode with, maybe pricing strategies, but I did try going from I tried changing to a lowish monthly fee instead of eliminating the high upfront cost for a website and I think it was like 2.

99 a month or something indefinitely. I did do that change but again, like this was young Kelly with no future thought. And I did that and realized that I went from, making my 8, 000 a month or whatever in upfront website fees to making 600. So it was a very big, very big drop.

If you’re going to do that, like if I were to start over, I would. Definitely consider something like [00:33:00] that as an option. But moving to a strategy like that is definitely something to do slowly.

Well, once you’re used to it once

you’re

Okay. Like you said earlier, you hit a hundred K without even realizing it, which is like, I know,

Come on, Kel, like that’s embarrassing.

Once you’re used to a certain amount of money coming in every month. And then you try to change strategies like now instead of charging three grand and getting that, in a matter of a few months now you’re only getting nine, 600 in three months for 900. And you’re like, ah, but if you started out that way, that wouldn’t be bad.

I know that I’ve wanted to do that too. Cause it seems like such a win win it’s like, Hey, you know, you have a,

you have a built in level of when the redesign would happen, because. Obviously, you would have to throw that in there at some point instead of it being this project fee.

It’d be like rolled in or something. I don’t know. But yeah, I had that all mapped out and I just kind of forgot about oh, my income is going to get cut into a fraction in one month. I should slow roll [00:34:00] this.

When you switched billing, the Oh, I don’t want to talk about it.

And then came back, and then came back to FreshBooks. Did clients have to re sign up for AutoPay? Oh, wow. Thank God. That was my only saving

grace. That was it. They, it had, even though I deleted every single one of those recurring invoices, it was stored. And the deleted folder.

And so all I had to do was undelete them. How great

is fresh. Hallelujah.

I know I’ll, I don’t think I’ll ever leave them again.

I hear you on the credit card. Raise the prices

and eat those fees. It’s just the way you gotta do.

So since I split hosting revenue with Jake, I have to figure out, every month, the card fees that we paid and make sure I subtract that from the split amount. And it’s cause I count it as an expense.

And it’s yeah, every month I want to say it’s like around a thousand dollars a month, maybe a little more. And so. There’s 10, 12K sitting there per year that you’re just paying in credit card fees.

And you know what? It’s going to fix that. Crypto [00:35:00] is going to fix that. Anyway. Probably.

Probably. That’s another episode. But yeah, I think we did, I think we got everything out that we were planning on there. Yeah.

I got one more resource and then a question for you. So I already mentioned our blog page at breakintoweb.

com resources. There’s that summer freelance. There’s also a. Yeah. Post I wrote called how can I find the time to build my web design business of six figures and it’s got a whole like Realistic timeline from someone starting from scratch, right? Yeah that they don’t even know how to build a website So if you know how to build a website, it’s gonna take a lot less time than that blog post but check out that blog post out but speaking of How much time it takes to get six figures a general question here Was it harder to get to your first six figs than the additional six figs?

Then the multi, not seven figs, multi yeah, that’s a good question. I think it took me a solid, I think it was six years to get to six figs, but the first like four of those, I wasn’t really trying, it was my hobby [00:36:00] gone out of control thing. And so once I started taking it seriously as a business, it probably took, I don’t know, two to three years to get to six figs.

figures, maybe less. But then from six to multi six was probably two to three as well. I’m not sure when in that timeline, I like flipped the switch to recurring revenue. I should look that up. But I know that I would have never hit multi six without it. I

agree. I agree that there’s no way I would ever hit multi six without recurring revenue.

And then recurring revenue gave Jake and I. The confidence to spend, I think we spend around 25, 000 to acquire those sites gave us the confidence to buy Superfly, which wasn’t, which was a great deal, but still not cheap. And that, and so that, I think that’s why it’s easier to get. The additional a hundred K’s added on.[00:37:00]

Oh,

that’s true. That’s a good point. Yeah. The

journey from zero to a hundred K is in my opinion, way harder than a hundred K to 200 K.

Yeah, no, I would agree with that. I would agree with that. Totally.

Yeah. All right. Is that is

that a wrap? I think it is. All my notes are checked off.

Yay.

Thanks for tuning in everyone and joining us today on the web design empire. Also check out breakintoweb. com. Learn how you can break away from your daily grind, become a freelance web designer and create the empire you’ve been dreaming of. Cheers y’all.