How I Grew My Web Design Agency To Over 70 Clients In 1 Year

all right so I'm Jordan from Island web design and today we're going to be talking about how I grew Island web design to the point where we now have about 70 clients and we've only been in business 12 months so this is my BBC Radio gzi interview I talk about how I grew the company how I was able to leverage social media to grow so fast um how we were able to get so many clients and just our general approach a little bit about my story as I said I was able to grow the company rapidly I'm now going to be posting on this YouTube Channel showing you behind the scenes different things we're doing at the company there's loads of interesting going on here so make sure subscribe for more but now let's get into the interview but first let me just say that they did cut up what I said a little bit and they kind of made it sound like I said something I didn't say when they asked me about why I named the company Island web design but I am going to cover that at the end so if you want to know why I named the company Island web design make sure you stay stay tuned till the end now we've been having this series of young entrepreneurs and it made me think about what sort of young people do when they're coming out of work and wanting to do their own jobs well one of them that I've been ched to is a um a 25y old lad here in gery who chose to become an entrepreneur and start his own business but why and how does it fit around other commitments and life when you're heading into your 20s you know how do you do it how do you measure that time well last week I spoke to Elliot Cocker the managing director at TDR and today we're hearing from Jordan manga the owner of Ireland web design you might have seen some of his adverts popping up on Facebook or Instagram I know I certainly have and I wanted to find out what it's like to be a young entrepreneur we make websites and do marketing for ganzi and Jersey businesses but the way that we do it differently is basically the social media side of it like I'm the only founder of any agency over here in my 20s so um our whole USP is like being up to date with all the modern Trends we've got the context we know what's what works today because I'm part of the generation that are involved in all that so I just took that approach I noticed there was a massive Gap in the market for that over here because the first thing I did when I looked like I'm going to start a web design company was I looked on Facebook like what other companies are advertising so you can go to the Facebook ad Library you can have a look and just have a look like oh in gy what people are advertising web design and there wasn't anybody I found like one faceless account which probably wasn't even local it was probably UK or whatever advertising just in general to like you know loads of areas all the people I follow on social media that do web design all the successful ones that the thing they all have in common is social media like that's where they get their um all their business from you know what I mean so I was like yeah there's obviously a gap in the market or there's a reason they're not doing it I'll just find out you know so uh just started running ads and I found it really hard to get used to my voice and stuff at first and I was just very unanimated and I wasn't putting my face in the videos either at this point which is something I've become fairly well known for now so uh at this point it was kind of just b roll stock footage with me narrating over it and even at this point that got traction because nobody else was doing social media or doing it kind of that way and I found that if you just a normal business owner on Facebook and you want to hire somebody to build a website before I was on Facebook all the time you wouldn't know of any but you'd have to go and search like you don't you don't just know of any web design companies but now like I'm actively putting myself in front of like people that might decide oh I'm going to start a business I need a website or whatever so now there's actually somebody that these people know of after a while I I actually took a coaching call of a guy I've been following online a guy that I learned a lot of stuff from and we went through my staff all my numbers and that and one thing the main thing that he said that stuck with me was you should just put your face in the videos especially in a a small community like you're talking about you from gy and and Jersey and all this there isn't that many people when we're talking about marketing audiences we're normally talking about millions of people just in general so if you put your Fai in it and and you're good you then you you're pretty much guaranteed to get traction he said don't obviously you have to be good though you know so uh I literally got off that call and recorded a load of videos in my face in it and because obviously we were doing very good web design like it isn't just the marketing approach that's um future facing all this kind of stuff it is also the web design like we're actually building modern websites that are like in line with you know like worldclass web designs in 2024 so uh all of that just came together really well and when I put my face in the videos it was pretty much straight away that there was like it just had the complete desired effect to be honest I mean people just like saw me related to me people don't relate or really have relationships with things or objects people relate to people you know like your best friend is a person your everybody everybody in your life is a person that you don't have relationships within animate objects so people were able to associate with my face a lot more like as soon as I got my face in it there was a lot of comments and stuff actually like people just saying oh what a nice young man like putting himself out there and stuff which was pretty much the desired effect so yeah from there I just carried on doing that and now I'm pretty sure like loads of people know me people come up to me in town sometimes and be like oh you're the guy from Instagram so my ad are definitely getting around obviously we have a lot of business and we're building a load of amazing websites for our clients so yeah it's definit it's definitely worked so my plan now is just to carry on doing the exact same thing but just scaling it up you know fantastic that's great to hear and just to go back to that sort of first sort of time that you were doing this as well and you were sort of bringing the business together you know because you did it at a young age was there any consideration of you know thinking oh I might want to go to uh like University or I might want to do it in this role or that when was it that you thought I want to do this as a business well that obviously it wasn't my first consideration to start a business I'd been very very involved in web design like I knew I wanted to learn a skill because I knew a skill set would be valuable and the skill that I landed on was like coding and web design so and I knew I was good at it so at this point I was going I wanted to get a job in the industry I was like great like I now have a skill set in an industry that actually like pays really well you know it's it's just like a great industry to work in especially if you enjoy doing Tech and stuff you're not going to be clock watching like you're actually going to be enjoying your job so I went around I don't have any qualifications I don't have a degree like you said didn't go to university so I wasn't really taken seriously like the way the recruitment meetings went would be like like love my work love me we get we' have a really good conversation about just general stuff like you know and for example I mean one conversation pretty much ended by them saying oh well yeah great why don't you go like wait till September and go back to college and get your equivalent of C in English and then we can get the it companies to take you seriously and you can come back and I I decided there and now I I'm just going to start a company because this has been a pattern now and obviously my qual because I don't have qualifications and stuff the way I looked at it was if I work for a company and I build your website you got a website built by me but if I if you hire my company to build your website and I build your website you still got a website built by me so regardless it didn't have much of a result on the like it didn't affect the end result you know what I mean so I'd argue people were getting better end results because as I said I'm I'm doing modern web design I'm not using templates I'm doing custom designs for everybody building custom platforms and I knew I was going to do this from the start like I knew like everybody was kind of I saw a lot of Wordpress websites around and website Builders no code tools so I knew if I was doing custom code custom designs and all this kind of stuff that it would do well so I was like okay I need to just try and learn about business like the same way that I did web design and development which was just consume as much information as possible as often as I can so I did the same thing with with with business basically and obviously the business was a lot more like learning while doing as well like I just spent about six months at the start just like learning everything I think I would need to know and all that but you can only Lear most things you learn by doing initially I was just going to do work for free yeah and I just thought if you like you know that's the general kind of advice you get is do work for free you can get good reviews and you can get a portfolio and that's exactly what I was going to do and my dad approached me at the time just randomly obviously he knew I was what everything I was doing and he said Jen you could build my bus or website and and I'm like well yeah okay and he's like all right they probably won't pay you for it but it's it's get your foot in the door and get a project I'm like yeah great and they write me a review and that so I'll do I'll do it I designed them a website and it's actually on my portfolio now and people still call me to this day and ask for one like that one so I did their website they wrote me a great review they were so happy with it they actually paid me as well so that went amazingly so I now had a good project on my portfolio and a review and so now people seeing my ads come to my website seeing good work and yeah from there it's just it's just kind of picked up from people seeing my ads and obviously people referring me as as well you know one of the things you picked up on there as well is the um is those adverts that we see from uh time to time that pop up on our social media now I mean you've been doing this a few years now and this is probably a bit of a big question but we've been in business since January janary yeah one year right how much even over this last year has the sort of advertising landscape of social media changed uh I mean if I was going to do the last decade could say why it's exploded and it's gone but it seems to be constantly evolving at the moment is is that right exactly yeah if we were going to go back to the last decade like that it probably wouldn't have existed at the start I don't think I was actually watching somebody today who was talking about Facebook ads in 2014 and talking about how they were one of the very few people that knew about it so it evolves very quickly and that that's something that I always say is this is a very fast moving future facing industry like built around online built around around you know Trends and just everything that's happening like it's very it's very fastpaced so like being able to keep up with that is like you know our unique sing point is I keep up with that I'm in context with all of this kind of stuff and not only am I able to apply it to my advertising so I can do what works but I can I'm also then able to apply it to my clients so they can now do what works so we're actually just bringing a load of people forward because gzi does tend to be a little bit behind with things right so I feel like I've bought a lot of people forward and just brought a lot of people into as I said all the people I was following online in the UK and stuff were doing this already now we've been having a chat with Jordan major the owner of Ireland web design we've been asking him a little bit about starting off as a young entrepreneur on the island as part of a series of it to find out the sort of challenges that they've been through what it's like for them to set up in the first place and how they've taken to it we were heing about Jordan's Journey a little bit earlier on but I was asking him as well about what the future looks like for him yeah well I actually have a lot of plans for this year I'd really like to hiire somebody and if there was the correct person they would already work for me now so that has been something that I've I've wanted to do for a while because I want to be able to hire somebody that is either as good as me or I can train to be as good as me or not necessarily as good as me but to be able to do it how I do it you know so the idea is to build a team like I called the company Island web design right because I I I I did that with the intention of I intended to grow this fantastic looking forward it sounds like exciting times as well one thing I was wondering with this as well because you've done this yourself now but what would you say to someone else that was maybe you know thinking in a similar position maybe they've uh done the gcc's or they've done the rare levels they're not exactly sure what they want to do and they're thinking oh you know what I'd give business a try but I don't really know much about you know what would you what would you say to someone who's who's thinking about following your Footsteps in that sense okay well I actually spoke at the College of Fe about a week ago about this exact uh topic kind of trying well one one of the topics that I cover was like okay so if some if any of you have an idea what are the actual actionable steps you can take and the main thing that I tell everybody if you have a skill set in something like you're really good at something you have a skill set in it or you have a unique knowledge baseed in something you know more about it than everybody else and you're good at it what you can do matters not oh okay that's amazing but do you ever see in English you know that's that that that conversation is never going to happen between a person and a business obviously I wish I did have all the grades because I never would have gone through the kind of embarrassment of like you know with the recum agencies and all that kind of stuff so it's always better to have that like I I kind kind of wish I did but it hasn't hindered me because my work's good so that's why I always tell people if you have a unique knowledge base in something you know more about it than anybody else you're better than this at anybody else you're just really good at something and you put yourself out there and just have like evidence you can do it like for example I have reviews and my portfolio is massive right so at the start as I said getting free reviews and stuff it's getting evidence all you're doing is building up evidence you can do it and the more evidence you build up the less likely people are to ask you if you have any qualifications experience is far more valuable that's why most jobs when you come out you know uh entry level jobs or whatever they're actually asking for however many years of experience at entry level because experien is more valuable than the degree right people are going with the degree and not the experience and they don't get the entry level job so uh your experience and what you can actually do is always going to be more valuable yeah totally and you know you talking about those recruitment agencies as well that you were talking about with that c in English it sounds like one of those things though that you know have you taken that on and sort of almost as like a a prove your wrong type thing you know one of those challenges you've overcome to then go no I'm I'm actually going to make my own way in this world uh well not necessarily I mean it definitely motivated me but the thing is my intention was always to get the job in like the company so all I did was cut out the step of being able to get the job for the simple step for the simple fact I couldn't get the job you know if I could have got the job I would have that that I would have taken that plan what I'm saying is it doesn't have to be professional experience it doesn't have to be experience in a role you know like it just have to be experience doing the thing well for people as I say it massively motivated me I decided there and then I was going to start the company but the reason I decided there and then to start the company is because it became my only option finally as well one thing you P you talked about right at the start was interacting with humans through video and you know you can you don't relate to things but you relate to people yeah if it take for a long time it's always seem to me that it's being quite it can be quite remote you know it's been quite a lot of web pit like do you think the future is going to be a lot more sort of uh sort of human facing when it comes around to technology I know it's a massive question but I cannot let it go without sort of asking those lines to be honest right I think the way AI is going and that like it probably is going in the opposite direction like but at the same time I would say like one of the people always say to me for example right oh it's great you can work from anywhere and I say well I can but like actually one of the thing that make that makes Island we design unique and makes people like us is that I'm there I'm meeting people people know that like they're going to meet me they're going to talk to me the same guy that they saw on the ads who they liked you know so the human connection is really important but when I say people can relate to people doesn't have to be a video it can be a story that somebody wrote you know it can be the written word like people just relate to people rather than like you know feeling an affinity to normally if people feel an affinity towards a logo or something there some sort of face associated with it hence why Nike will have us Bol in their ad and Michael Jordan because that's the person they're associating with it to make the brand actually valuable and relate to people you know so I do think yeah I definitely think we're going away from like you know for example in over the last 10 years or whatever we had FaceTime and all this kind of stuff obviously the mobile phone before that but like now you've got like the Apple Apple have got glasses they're developing Facebook changed their name to meta and they developing these goggles and stuff and uh chat GPT has obviously massively taken over I mean I I use chat GPT for like to autom make kind of basic admin tasks and stuff and it's really helpful and that actually I'd probably have like an admin person work for me if I didn't have that so it's definitely going that way but the human touch is something it's Irreplaceable like even like you know chatting to a chat bot even though it comes across like a human it's not you know you don't feel the same way towards it and it it's actually sometimes wrong and all this kind of stuff so yeah just people are always going to Value the human connection and if you can if the world is moving away from Human connection and you can take your business and move towards it then I think you're probably going to do better than the people moving away really nice to catch up with Jordan major to find out his experiences of being a young entrepreneur on the island and going out on his own to do it and we'll bring you more in that series like we did last week with Elliot Cocker the managing all right so he just cut out most of what I said he made it sound like I said I called the company Island web design because I just intend to grow it that doesn't even make sense what I said was and I have no idea why they cut it out is I called the company Island web design because in the Islands G gy or Jersey Island electric is the main electric company Island this is the main that Island this is the main this if something has the name Island in it people will normally assume it is the main one that is why I called the company Island web design and I intend to be the web design company in the Channel Islands that provides modern future facing web design that's why I called the company Island web design not because I intended to grow it all right so I hope that was helpful I'm obviously a bit annoyed that they cut off what I said about the name of the company but you know what I said now and in future videos we're going to be going into way more depth I'm going to show you the AI automations I actually do all my client onboarding we're onboarding about 10 clients a month and AI handles all of it that's going to be the next video so make sure you subscribe for more and if you want to check out all the awesome work we've already done as a company for our clients you can find the link in the description thanks for watching

Channel: Jordan @ Island Web Design

Views: 5,996

Keywords: Web design, Social media marketing, Business growth, Entrepreneur tips, Guernsey, Client acquisition, Marketing strategies, Startup growth, Digital marketing, Success story, Web design success stories, Growing a business on social media, Entrepreneurial growth strategies, Island Web Design, Social media marketing tips, Business growth hacks, Guernsey business success, Web design and social agency growth, How to gain clients quickly, Leveraging social media for business

Id: kYmELoDfU3o

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2024