How To Build a One-Man Design Agency Doing $500k/y

on today's episode I'm talking to Rich Webster who's a designer that is doing 500 000 a year as a designer by only working 15 hours a week when I first heard this I was like this doesn't sound like a possible thing so I need to check out this guy and this conversation was so fun I actually learned some things myself through and I think it's really great conversation you're going to learn a lot so enjoy this conversation with Rich Webster Rich what's up good to have you on the show thank you for thank you for having me it's great to be here yeah man um listen I I'm wondering where to get started I'll share this you know when back in my old office I had this kind of like thing pasted on my back which said work hard and be nice to people and then I go into your Twitter which is where I found you and I see that it says work less and I'm like how is that possible and be nice to people yeah yeah work less and be nice to people I mean okay this guy seems like he's also knows what he's doing and we I Wonder If we have different approaches or philosophies to work and life in general and I'm just curious to to hear your story and then talk about work philosophy and just like dive into it so I would love to hear the story of your first of your design agency how did that came to be and yeah how did you get started in that sure sure so my story is I graduated from college around I think I finished in 2012 and ironically no so I did not take the traditional route um I actually studied marketing which ironically I mean I always talk about like you know it was like a 200 000 college degree and it was not very useful honestly um at that time in 2012 I know like colleges have gotten better at this but in the states they were really not teaching me any of the skills that I needed to be an entrepreneur and to run my own business uh they taught me skills that were very good to become an employee but not to be a business owner so I felt like I had just like huge gaps in my skill set that I didn't even know existed right like how do you you know get on a call and do you know talk sales how do you you know I didn't know anything about design copywriting like there's just so many skills that are required now to run an online business or just to run a business in general that I didn't pick up so if I wanted to work in finance or Consulting um or any of the big firms I would have been perfectly set up for that but as a business owner I graduated and was kind of like uh uh what do I do now so I finished up school and I was pretty clear at that point I you know I had done an internship maybe in my sophomore junior year and I was pretty clear that the last thing I wanted to do was to have a regular job um it just did not speak to me it was not really interested in it I you know did the nine to five office thing and I was doing this job like straight out of office space like you know it was like data entry where I was like calling up I was calling up these like State you know Medicaid boards to gather data to put in this it was literally like the spreadsheet job and uh it was terrible uh but uh it told me right away that I did not want to be you know an employee so when I graduated I didn't really have much in mind and I was kind of just like flying by the seat of my pants and you know in hindsight I think it's really easy to look back and tidy everything up and say oh well then this happened and this happened and this happened and now I'm here but I will really say that like for the first years the first five years that I was in business I honestly had no idea what I was doing I didn't know what I wanted to do um and the main objective from probably 2012 to like 2016 was like just say yes to stuff figure out how to make money you know decide what I like to do and uh there was not much structure around it and this is coming from someone who like you know I always say I never really intended to be a designer or to get into the design industry um but I kind of fell backwards into it I had this guy that I was kind of friends with and he runs a great design agency in Washington DC they're called District Design Group and I was just spending a lot of time over at his house and at a certain point I was just like looking over his shoulder I was like hey can you show me how to do that and I literally just got to the point where like I would harass this dude and be like let me pull up InDesign show me how to do that what's that keyboard shortcut how do I move things around wait what was it designing what kind of design work are you doing yeah yeah so it was graphic design and web design those were kind of his two main main things so I was doing a lot of print Publications obviously because InDesign um and then they were doing sites as well and you know his wife is a developer so it's like it's the Dream Team and what I found which was funny about you know learning design as someone with no art skill no intent to go to design school skill uh school I mean so often you hear people and they're like you know I always knew I wanted to be an artist I've always been super creative and all this stuff like that was not me at all if you were like rich I need you to draw uh you know a house on a piece of paper um I could give you a stick figure and that's and that's about it so I never really fancied myself an artist but what I realized was like I was really good at replicating other designs and then I could like pick up the Frameworks behind it and start to understand like why they made these decisions that they did so I really come at design from a much more kind of analytical framework than most which is like you know they have this creative brain and like you know they they understand either way this is it like that you know as you know I teach people how to design and this is actually a a very good framework to begin with replicate other people's work you will by doing this figure that's why you see people in museums copy the great artists I mean that's people do this to learn so this is actually a great way to to get started I mean I found it insanely helpful and I think you know when I talk to people who are beginners it's my my number one tip honestly I'm like go find a piece of world-class design pull up a blank canvas and just keep moving stuff around until it looks exactly the same and just by getting into the muscle memory of like okay this line of type is this big this sub line is this big you start to get a feel like oh there's proportion there's hierarchy here and I kind of picked up all of this without any formal education just by like copying this dude being like hey can you look at my design and tell me why it's bad and uh it was kind of just like a natural process that happened over the years so how do you get into somebody to pay you to do that what was that how did I get it how did I get into it okay so yeah who was the first one actually willing to pay you to do that you know he was nice and he let me do some subcontract work but you know what's funny the first year the friend was the lead yeah my friend yeah got it yeah the first year that I was in business um and I always say this because when you know I share like you know my kind of Revenue numbers on social media people are like well I just can't even imagine getting there because it's so high right like in 2022 I did like over five hundred thousand dollars uh but the first year I was in business I made ten thousand six hundred and seventy two dollars which if you were in the United States I would have made more money working at McDonald's or like Walmart or any any minimum wage job right so like I was not All-Star world's best designer you know business genius by any means when I first started it out um so yeah that was like the early part of my journey which honestly I don't talk about that much online because I don't know I think there's a lot of people that have like great great takes and experience on how to get from like zero to one uh but most people tend to come to me to get from like one to ten or ten to one hundred um but I think I think it's really important there I actually think it's really important to dwell on this because I think now what's going viral on social media is exactly the I don't know if it's even the second step or third or tenths to a hundredth step that is scaling and leveraging that which we'll get into because this is really awesome but people miss out on the the skill building grungy beginning of you know hustling and that's yeah you that cannot be skipped right you cannot start from Step 10 to you know without going through one to ten right yeah no totally I mean I think that is the one piece that that people miss out on and you know I can give all my Frameworks how I think about business you know how I deal with clients and sales and systems and all this stuff but like the prerequisite and I really sometimes feel like maybe I don't mention this enough is like yeah the one prerequisite is you have to be good and there is no substitute for time when it comes to getting good like you can pay for experience you can play pay for acceleration but there is a tax and it is the getting good tax and I you know it is something that I still work on you know there's always like one or two new things that I'm trying to up level on even 10 years into this now as I'm sure you you are as well but the things that we work on switch right you know in the beginning it was how can I make design that clients don't look at and they're like uh what is this and now it's like okay you know how can I how can I run a business better things like that yeah for sure so what was the what are some of the things that help you level up from the cringy design into oh I actually can get really good clients to work with me what were some of the things that help you on that okay so I think in terms of like hard skills there's just a certain level of taste and execution and speed that you need to get to as a designer um and you know the skills that I stacked to get to where I was now was first like I mentioned I really started honestly just playing the copy game where every day you know I would wake up I would pull up something that was good you know that like someone you know whether it was an award-winning site or just some design that I thought was awesome and then I pull up a blank canvas and would say how can I get from point A to point Z and would just sit there and try to try to make it work until I got there and that was really the visual design chops that I first started with you know back in what was it 2013 2014 there like there was no you the way that there is now I think if I was doing it now I probably would have just pulled up YouTube and you know took a couple of courses and things like that but you know it was Slim Pickens back in the day and you really did have to do more networking and talk to experienced people um but once I got like the design skills Under Wraps I think the next big skill set that I picked up was actually I stacked on animation on top of that and for my business that was a really big unlock um and it kind of got us to the point where I am now which is you know my agency is kind of a full service agency so we don't just do one specific Niche thing right when clients hire us I'm pretty much available for anything creative um you know there's really no limit on the scope for the most part so when I was able to take what I learned as a designer and then start stacking animation on top of that um that was kind of like blowing the lid off the roof um so when you can pick up that like second complementary skill there's really no substitute for it so if you're a designer and you can pick up development right that's a perfect example of it or you're an animator uh an editor and you pick up animation same idea right you stack that on top or you might pick up like a business soft skill and add that to the mix so maybe you spend some time figuring out how to do sales right where you add copywriting I think there's just like a handful of skills right now and just rattle off the top of my head that I really like in for a stack design development editing I think is really important copywriting sales public speaking if that would be my list if you're like how do I up level next I think those will not go out of style they probably won't be so quote me on this they won't be replaced by Ai and uh it's just like a good investment dude I love I love that you said that I think if you I don't know if you can sort through the first video on my channel which is I think 26 16 the first video on this channel is called the full stack designer Manifesto and this is exactly what I'm saying there it's like word for words like stack your skills design development I didn't say animation I said video but yeah copywriting when you can solve your clients all of these things together there's like immense value to be unlocked um yeah I love I love that we share that so I'm I'm I'm intrigued in hearing on so you've started off kind of guy getting leads from your friend were you always kind of like a one-person when did you start delegating if so how like how did that happen so I always benefited from and you know I don't think it's an accident that I ended up in this situation um but benefited from my network and knowing people and collaborating with people so over the years I have done collaborative projects with a bunch of people um especially I found like collaborations with people with complimentary skills that I don't have are really important um so you know I have a long time business partner that I have worked with clients on for a really long time and uh his skill set is completely different so he's a PR person right so he understands by the way like what is your when you're saying your network what is your like what is your network for example I had my network from high school I had my network from design school I have like I've been in the military so I have a network like what what are your circles where what kind of a network worked for you yeah so I kind of cobbled together this network honestly just from work experience and being in the scene in in Washington DC so I started my business in DC and I got to know people just through like you know I did some like freelance work at a radio station and I met people there like it was honestly all really random and serendipitous and there wasn't like particularly a strategy around it um but you know it was kind of all over the place and at that time I don't live in DC anymore I live in Philadelphia It's a small world so you know you start getting to know people and this is just so different than how people know me now so most people know me from social media and the great irony of that is I built my entire business prior to being on social media for the last two years so my my first social media post was I'm coming up on the two-year anniversary of it so I've never my agency doesn't have a web uh social media page um I never got a client from it you know it was all kind of like the old school networking and referral Playbook um which I think you know so often people say you know just post your portfolio on Instagram and clients will find you and I I never did that I I had to get the exact same I had the exact same experience I mean I had like my one-person business caped at 300K before I kind of moved into education but at that point I already had a YouTube channel which I was doing just for fun as a creative Outlet like this Channel and people on the channel assumed that YouTube is what brings me the client although all of my clients I'm based in Tel Aviv Israel so all of my clients were local like none of them even knew that I had a YouTube channel so it's it's very similar I think your local network of where you are is so underrated uh and social media is so overrated um I think social media is good for reach but it's low trust in terms of people when when you meet them in person it's uh or get a referral right it's so much higher trust I mean the one thing I'll say and I had this conversation with uh Jamie brindle he you might know he's got a pretty big IG page and we were talking about this and I was like so like have you ever gotten leads for your agency through your social media and he was like you know not really but the one thing that does happen is people will be like I've seen you on Instagram like I've seen your face on my phone before and that builds trust um but what's crazy for me is like you know I've got 250 000 Instagram followers I've got an email list with like 17K people on it and none of that translates into clients at all because it's not targeted for that right I have the people that I'm talking to online are not the people who are my ideal client and I'll get into like what my ideal client is um but people have this misconception that like oh if you just have a large number people will just pay you money and it couldn't it couldn't be any more true I mean I thought that when I started on social media I was like well listen once I have a hundred thousand followers like money just happens and it's not that at all you know you have to be targeted and talking about something all right so we were I was asking about delegation like at what point yeah okay so let me let me run the story here so you know 2012 whatever graduated probably up until 2016. um I was just figuring out how to get good you know I was stacking skills honestly like if I looked back on that period any of the ways that I think about business now were not even on my radar at all like there was just nothing in my brain about business I was just like showing up to survive and do stuff and say yes like the way I think about all this stuff possibly not a word that you're you looking exactly so 2016 to 2019 was kind of where I dialed in um and you know I was like probably six figure freelancer slash you know mini agency um but what I found at that point was I made a common mistake that I see happen over and over again where people get to a certain point in their creative business and this isn't just creatives you know you know whether you're a coach or consultant or whatever any solopreneur um where you become maxed out on two things you're maxed out on time and you're maxed out on money and you feel like you've hit the ceiling what do you mean so I understand maxed out on time what do you mean by maxed out on money okay so they are really two sides of the same coin because once you're maxed out on time there's no more time left in the day there's really no good way to figure out how to make more money because all of your time is spent on fulfillment and just doing the work for your current clients so you know everyone has if your time is maxed out you're basically maxed out your yeah your money you know whatever at whatever rate you're currently charging you know there's there's a cap there yeah and unless you can kind of take a step back which I'll talk about and restructure how you do things and give yourself some breathing room you're not going to be able to figure out how to get more money um because at a certain point you know the way that we solve that problem is more hours and everyone has only 168 hours in the week and you cannot fix that equation by trying to jam more hours and by not sleeping like it just doesn't work so for me I ended up building myself kind of this like business prison where I was effectively like the only employee of my own business and I was not a great boss [Laughter] I you know I kind of built myself this job and I hit this like weird inflection point and ironically it was kind of precipitated on you know I was on vacation and I take a long deserved vacation after a while and I don't know about you but sometimes like if I can just get out of the day-to-day of running the business and give myself a few days to think like all of a sudden all the things that I'm doing that like are really not rational or don't make too much sense come into Clarity and I was sitting on this beach and I picked up the book four hour work week which I had never read before and you know I devoured this thing and it like blew my mind open and if you haven't read it highly recommend it it's a 10 out of 10. really really enjoy it I have not read that but I've read others by Tim Ferriss yeah yeah yeah yeah um well it's really good um and that was kind of like just when I look back sitting up for some reason sitting on that beach reading that book and just getting some of the lessons that like the way that I've been operating I don't have to operate that way really really shifted everything um and I spent the next three years maybe a little bit more um figuring out how to design myself out of my business so I you know the story that I told myself was like okay so up until that point you did not delegate anything zero no delegation one no one-man show every once in a while I would partner with someone um but it would be more of like a this 50 is yours for your work and this 50 is mine so it was really more like a joint venture type thing as opposed to delegation where like you know I was getting some profit and you know there was a benefit and you never had you know the conception of hey an agency I mean because it's a it's a popular model right I mean there are design agencies out there so I've honestly kind of Fallen backwards into this and I was always what I consider to be an agency in name only right and I didn't understand that this was like strategic on my part it's just kind of something that I did accidentally and now you know I recommend it to a lot of Freelancers I'm like listen clients will pay more if you just have a name of your company and it's not your name um because you know I always say that like the term freelancer often implies commodity pricing and that you are just in interchangeable like substitute employee I don't fully agree I don't fully agree just in short my perspective is some clients do not want to work with agency because they think they are big expensive and bureaucratic and they want to work directly with a creative person second of all freelancer we can talk about the freelancer but you know a different name for that would be a consultant or something like that if you want to you know be perceived as highlight level or more strategic that's still I mean you can raise your prices and it's it's not necessarily cheap being a one-person business and you know the face of the company does not necessarily mean lower prices but that's it that that was a diversion fair enough I'm sold on that for my positioning and where my business ended up it made most sense to be an agency in name only you have to understand in the market that I'm in everything is Market dependent Washington DC the you know going situation was that like everyone has a business right and whether you're Consulting you've got a Consulting business um okay so the next step that I did was I figured out how to design myself out of the business and at this point like I was doing pretty well money-wise um I had figured out how to get clients on retainer um I had switched from the hourly billing model so there were a lot of things that I had already implemented but the big you know blockage for all of this was just like my time um I was the bottleneck to my business because I was doing all the Fulfillment myself and uh I kind of just started figuring this out piece by piece um and they're kind of like four areas where I feel like I really implemented to get to this point now where like I'm able to work way way way less than I ever did okay so number one I'll rattle them off real quick number one which I just talked about was I stopped selling time for money that was the number one thing was all the offers that I presented to my clients were not based on the billable hour so retainer or project base and the benefit for this was I was able to extricate myself from the billable hour and say okay you know although retainer is still selling time but it's just chopped differently it's not they're not looking at your hours but it right it's reserving time yeah there is always I I feel like I want to do like an hour-long podcast on just like the billable hour um because I spent so much time about it and honestly like my hot take is that there is no ethical way to build hourly um I think that you know I I don't know I don't bring ethics into it I just think it's like wrong incentives for everybody for everything yeah exactly totally totally I mean think about like your first hour of the day working versus your last hour of the day your energy is going to be higher at the beginning than the end but it's still charged at the same time it doesn't matter it doesn't matter like you shouldn't be incentivized to work longer I mean your clients want to get the work faster and you want to get the I mean you shouldn't be incentivized to work more I mean I think the incentives are are all messed up so anyway stop selling time for money number one change the offer change the pricing number two was I started figuring out and I implemented a lot of systems in my business to start setting boundaries because I figured out one of the best ways that I could work less was to create boundaries around a lot of the ways that my business functioned without impacting the delivery and the client experience at all a lot of these systems that I put in place were actually things that clients were happy to do so in my business a couple of things I'll just rattle off number one I only take meetings one day a week they're all clustered on Tuesdays and that is basically the only time where clients can talk to me there's a regular Cadence for that number two I don't write proposals number three I don't do social media I don't do any traditional marketing at all you know I kind of did like a 80 20 analysis on my clients and what I realized was that everything was coming from referral and word of mouth so rather than chasing and I see this so often people are like I need to post every day on social media because what if a client comes in from that and then all their if you look at what all the clients are coming from referrals so instead I triple down on referrals and built a system for that and I said we're not even gonna go for social media so I have all these no systems that I put in place communication policies working asynchronously replacing a lot of meetings and honestly just like removing a lot of the fat from the communication process with clients has made a huge difference in just like cutting out a ton of hours from the week with without affecting the results at all okay so that's number two number three was Building Systems and uh this was a huge unlock for me and the two systems that I would say I probably implement most with my design agency are Sops so standard operating procedures which are effectively checklists so figuring out as I went through my business one of the things that I do on a weekly basis that could be turned into a checklist that someone else other than me could do and as you probably know there are a million things like that that are not necessarily super important like you know filling out I don't know invoicing right like um just onboarding all these small things that happen that take up a bunch of time but aren't the meat of the project and then the other side uh is templates which I know you're familiar with and uh building out templates so that we're able to get predictable response results for the clients without necessarily having to worry about like starting from a blank page you know that is that is for designs you mean yeah yeah got it so we have templates and systems that we built for all the kind of standard projects that we work on so whether it's a graphic design project website wireframes um animations you know the idea is like build once sell as many times as you can and that doesn't affect the bespoke nature and the high ticket nature of what we do but as you know as a designer like there are just some things that like I'm gonna build this the same way because it's the right way to build it every time and so often we just start with a blank page for no reason other than we feel like we should um so that's like the two big systems that got dialed in and it was just removing myself from the Fulfillment so in any area where I didn't need to be the person doing it that's what I would do and then the last thing which I know you're really interesting yeah yeah exactly so go ahead sorry for cutting you off the last one is no you're cool you're cool the last one is delegation and uh this was probably the last piece of the puzzle that I implemented and uh this was the biggest unlock in my business and I've learned a ton about how to delegate effectively and I hear over and over again from people all the different ways about why delegation sucks number one thing that I hear is that there's no one good out there that it's impossible to find someone and everyone who tells me that they have talked to maximum one to two people and uh the big secret to delegation that no one wants to hear is that you need to talk to a ton of people okay like I've probably done interviews and sent out kind of like cold requests for over a hundred people to talk to for delegating out every single role in my business design development animation you know what I mean copywriting strategy marketing all of these different roles and I've had interviews with a ton of them and the bottom line is like delegating correctly is like finding you know the gold nugget on the beach we heal with the metal detector uh it is not something where you can just say the first person that I found is the one but when you have that roster and right now I have a team of probably like I say team Loosely of like I don't know maybe 10 to 12 Freelancers that are like my vetted go-to people who've been working with me for years now and they're like the backbone of the business you know what I mean they get paid exactly what they want when whatever their rates are and uh I can totally trust them to fulfill on the project and I think that's really the big missing piece um after setting the boundaries building the systems is just bringing in people who are skilled in order to take over the Fulfillment so that I can focus on where I provide the most value to clients and for me what I do now people ask all right rich like you work 15 hours a week running this agency what stuff do you do three things that I do are I do eye level strategy I do high level design so just the very tip of the iceberg and then I do sales and client management so the three areas where I feel like I provide the most value to clients are in those places and then everything else I've kind of delegated out over time very interesting so I had to bring three three three topics to discuss based on that but the first one you actually yeah the first one I actually you just tackled on it last which is I was going to say you've mentioned how important relationship was and how you know the clients are coming from referrals and I was going to say well so if they're coming for a relationship then they want to work with you and that's going to be a difficult thing to replace um but what I'm hearing from you is so I haven't replaced sales uh and even strategy and stuff like that uh or so I don't know if you do all client communication or frontal client communication um and if you that's okay if you only stack it on a Tuesday so you say okay I've got like clients Tuesday and that's okay um yep so that that was the first thing to ask but yeah okay so you've you've mentioned it so my my other question is and again I'm asking as somebody who started to go that route and again now I'm also managing a team and and I'm going down that route again one thing that I struggle with or that comes to my mind is you know I personally got into design because I actually really like doing it and I enjoy doing it and now now I'm in the business of again delegation and working with people and managing you know making sure they're accountable and they're delivering on good work and stuff like that and I personally find that way less fun than actually doing design work or or creative work it to me it's just like oh my God I have to talk to people again and have all the like these people issues again so like how do you think about that because it's you're right that's getting you leverage but then also that I don't know that it's fun but at least to Me Maybe people are different yeah no that's a great question and I think one of the the missing pieces and I know like you're building a team with I I imagine you I don't know what percentage of your team are full-time employees it's not a lot a lot of contractors a lot of yeah I think it's similar to you we've got actually three full-time people and then about 10 to 20 collaborators contractors that yeah doing part-time with us gotcha yeah it's really easy to fall into the Trap of like you just wake up and you're like wait did I just build myself like a manager position exactly why did I get in business and I think one of the things that I've always focused on strategically is just like knowing when to say this is enough and I'm kind of at this point now with my business where I feel like I'm at the perfect sweet spot of profit and time and honestly if you ask me like this is something people don't necessarily understand or can can't into it if you're like Rich what's your plan to double your Revenue you know next year to make your business bigger which most people are thinking about I would say that is not on the table the goal is to sustain this business at this size because to take this business model and double it is going to require input of my time right yeah I can manage 500k at 15 hours a week running my team taking care of the clients delivering really incredible results and you have to know like you know I've I work with six seven clients a year so one of the reasons that I'm able to not spend so much time in meeting hell and in delegation hell is because I'm really aligned on just like these are the perfect type of clients that I want to work with and anything outside of that is an automatic no for me a ton of money on the table this is a super for me personally where I am right now this is super insightful realization of this is the size of the business and it's not going to scale I don't know how you if that's naturally occurred to you I personally and just because I had a track record or for so many years growing and growing kind of like rapidly that when I got to this I guess you can call it plateau of size I immediately felt like a loser or trying to not well I either for not keeping on the growth or yeah again trying to throw more time or money at the problem Beyond be Beyond where where it makes me happy so I'm I'm dealing with this at the moment actually and I wonder how did you how did you became okay with it or you were it was never an issue I'm like okay so I'm not gonna be five million with you for me that's fine uh yeah I that was never my goal um I think I do have the benefit of like I'm not necessarily intrinsically motivated to get bigger and bigger for the sake of growing like one of the things I talk about you know I have this course that I teach and it's basically teaching people how to implement all these principles that I talked about and there's this idea of there's two types of entrepreneurs there's achievement entrepreneurs and there's lifestyle entrepreneurs and I really believe that it's a spectrum in between where an achievement entrepreneur is building for the sake of growing the big thing and for the achievement and you know when I talk about on the course as they get more productive they take those productivity gains and they invest it back into the business so if they can figure out how to remove five hours from their day in meetings they're gonna spend that five hours you know on strategy or doing something else I feel like whereas the other side like I already understand the question at the end the answer yeah the lifestyle person is going to remove five hours from their day and not not work more right they're gonna go and you know pick up a hobby or hang out and listen it's a spectrum um for a while when I taught it I was like okay there's either one or the other and what I've realized is everyone falls on a different place you know we all have that sweet spot of like achievement versus lifestyle and it's really on us to sit down and think about like what is the business that I want what size do I want there's no shame I mean listen dude you're like you know what you did 2 million last year in Revenue like you're you're doing well um most people would look at your business and say holy crap I could never imagine getting to that point so you're already a winner you know you're already an outlier compared to most um but the voice that we have in our heads and I see it too you know I don't know if you spend too much time on Twitter but uh there is always a bigger business out there and it's really easy to just like I know also I'm like oh I'm nothing yeah I'm it's really also important I'm based in Tel Aviv Israel it's really uh ecosystem of VC back startups which are all I would say fall into the achievement entrepreneurs and they actually like the language is actually kind of like saying a lifestyle business is kind of like derogatory it's like oh so you're just a Lifetime Fitness okay nice cute have fun playing with that well we the big boys go do something important with our lives right so I think I felt into that trap and now I'm trying to kind of like move myself into the spectrum of just being okay uh with having like a really long lunch break and you know um but yeah you know it doesn't you make it sound so bad like it no no it's yeah it's just something that I'm working through at the moment you know no totally I think it's the perfect time to have this conversation because you're in this place where like so you know when I was doing prep for this I watched your um you're in review video where you basically talked about how you implemented all this stuff into your business thinking like okay if I just invest all this into my business the obvious result is revenue is going to increase right and you did it stuff was happening some of the bets didn't work out some of it was out of your control and you basically stayed exactly the same right and as a result you spent all this money and there was nothing to show for it listen I've done that too in my business the only difference between me and you is that I bet a much smaller percentage on those kind of bets so rather than going all in and taking the achievement route where you're like let's reinvest it all back in in the the hopes of doubling revenue or whatever your goal was um I will take these bets often and say listen I'm willing to lose 20 grand here to see what happens and that the only real difference is just the scope at which I'm willing to do it so it's not like you have to stop making these bets but you don't have to go all in on like you know it's it's this or bust um so you're kind of treating your business like a you know a startup right like you talked about in your video where you're like all right the next step is scale to what seven uh eight figures is probably what you had in the back of your head um but you've got a beautiful business and listen this business that you have now 10 if you could run it for the next 10 years you will be more successful than 99.9 of people um because staying in business is an achievement that no one talks about yeah and people forget that you know like it's so let's talk about it so you talk about yeah so let's talk about this so now you have figured out an amazing thing right doing 500k with an agency doing 15 hours fantastic sounds phenomenal and now you start content business courses pumping out content newsletter posts on Instagram Twitter which is a lot of work so this is like so you're not working less you are also taking your time and investing it somewhere else which I'm interested to hear about yeah yeah yeah I'm glad you asked about this um so honestly we want to talk about 15 hours a week on my agency these days is even less um I probably so I track my time let's see if I can pull this up without slowing us down too much but um let's say last last week are you using toggle or yeah how'd you know because I opened up your last newsletter and so I was sponsored by Togo I was like I used to uh yeah it is um Taco's awesome I you know I really keep it super frictionless but yeah I mean I would say probably five you know I'm looking at this week three hours and 58 minutes on my agency um it's even I've just been doing this for so long and it's so dialed in and you know my freelancer has been working with work for my clients for a long time it is a well-oiled machine and what I think I just want to say real quick before we talk about my other business which I love talking about is um this is all about results um and I think what people pay me for now is they pay me for strategy high level thinking and then the design is almost like the party favors you know what I mean it's just the implementation on top of it so I'm able to provide because I've been in the business for a while like you know I can have a conversation with a client that is super valuable to them and you know potentially makes them a bunch of money just by you know giving my insights or my thoughts or whatever and then the the next end step is like okay now my team's gonna execute on what needs to happen to get that thing you know out the door so for me where I provide the most value it is strategy and thinking and then my team and the system that I built because I really do feel like it's a business system that I've been break all the time people leave people can show up you need to find a replacement this guy like happens and then you have to deal with it right it's not like on the week where the system works well fantastic but when the on the week that the system breaks it's a show yeah yeah I mean I've had a break over and over again um but what I've gotten better at is figuring out the places where it breaks and preempting them so there are just kinds of all kinds of little tiny tweaks that I've made that help mitigate the risk around places where it will break so I'll give you an example is delegation for instance right this is such a simple one but this is just how I think about it um when I give a deadline to someone on my team freelancer someone working on the project the deadline that they get is two days before the deadline that the client gets yeah right and that's just a simple system where if they miss a deadline they get sick they they do the work and it's messed up and they didn't do it right the first time there is lead time in there so I'm not like you know sometimes we're Our Own Worst Enemy and we'll just promise like it'll be due that day and that's the the Freelancers deadline and that's my deadline that's the client's deadline and then that's how you end up pulling out your hair so it's just all kinds of little mini risk mitigation things that have been put in over time but anyway if you're yeah let's talk about why I've got another business when this business just does its thing so it kind of happened by accident I really never intended to do this I have been someone historically who's been pretty not interested in social media in that entire world like I mentioned you know my agency doesn't have a social media page um I was not someone who was posting on social media even just for like Recreation um I would like you know lurk on Twitter and you know follow things that I was interested in but they weren't really they didn't have anything to do with business or anything like that like I'd be more likely to look at social media for like some hobby that I'm interested in like you know video games or like sports or whatever um but uh this is so funny because the impetus for this really goes back to you and you would have no idea about this so I hired like three years ago Christo to be my coach and I did a bunch of one-on-one coaching sessions with him which I feel like I made a really smart decision because I paid him for eight hours of coaching at his old rate which was I think a thousand dollars an hour um so I bought I spent eight thousand dollars on eight coaching sessions with him he charges five thousand an hour now so I feel like I really got arbitrageous which was what were the goals was the goal uh increasing like growing the agency or like what were you what were you trying to solve it was all it was all agency this you know the the social media business all that stuff didn't exist at all yeah and really it was just talking with him about like best practices around sales um delegation um and just his experience with an agency and I kind of took what I could from him and then plug it into my thing where like you know my biggest thing was like I just don't want I don't want to grow for the sake of growing yeah um I just want like a lean profitable business um so anyway I talked to Chris um the reason that I found Chris in the first place was or that I hired him was I watched the mock coaching session that you and him did on your YouTube channel video so many people refer to that video dude it was crazy so I just Googled Christo coaching because I was like I've never spent a thousand dollars on an hour of someone's time before you know I paid for like you know 200 bucks an hour every now and then just to like pick someone's brain um but a thousand was a lot so I was like all right let me watch this video and that was like the pre that was basically the sales call inadvertently that got me to work with Chris I wonder if this video made more money to me or to him but I guess for those of us both of us made me watch that video yeah but honestly it was super super helpful and I just got a sense for like all right how does this work you know like what's Chris like one-on-one Etc and that's that's been amazing so we worked together probably I don't know every like two or three months for the last couple of years um and things have really evolved and one of the things that happened was like I got to the point where I implemented all this stuff I felt like we were at like a logical place in terms of like you know my agency is more or less where it was now I've been I've been at this 500k number for a couple years and I was feeling good I was like all right well you know what's what's next and uh we were talking about and he was like you know you should consider talking about what you do online because your business is really different than everyone that I talked to I was born not really running design businesses like this uh so I kind of just was like all right sure whatever you know I can take a suggestion and when I posted for the first time on Instagram which is I'm coming up on the two-year anniversary I had no intention of anything coming from it right there was no strategy for like the goal was just like post and post every day is basically what Chris told me and see what happens and uh I ended up blowing up relatively quickly within like 90 days I had maybe like 10 000 followers which I didn't really understand at the time is unusual and uh from there it kind of just happened organically where I just started asking myself like okay what do people like hearing me talk about what do people want to know and then eventually I kind of took all of my learnings and everything that I've kind of put into place and productized it and turned it into this course and it was all really organic there was no plan to do this um it was really just based on like the questions that I got in the DMS what people wanted to know and what people liked hearing me talk about um and now I just love this business like I love teaching people I love you know doing the live sessions and everything and I'm kind of in a similar situation to you where it's like all right sounds very similar like I stumbled into this business as well I mean I I stumbled it as well and there's even like on that specific call with Christ over he's saying maybe YouTube can be your business I'm like no I don't care about that I don't want to teach people uh but yeah yeah but what's interesting and one thing that I'll say is people are like okay well wait why did you start a second business like don't you just want to like sit on the beach and do nothing with all of your free time and I still have that itch that everyone has to like create and do new things and help people and really the biggest reason is like I've spent my entire career using all these skills that I've gained to make my clients rich I mean listen I got paid for it but like I was always building someone else's business and there is just something that is really really satisfying about taking like what feels like the culmination of the last 10 years of experience and design work and strategy and marketing and all these things that I've learned and being able to just apply it 100 to your own thing like it's really cool I'm sure I I agree 100 I agree 100 percent dude Rich it was so fun talking to you it was like it would be a great conversation and I think it's going to be valuable for a lot of people so thank you for thank you for doing that yeah man 100 percent all right so let's wrap it up and yeah thank you so much man

Channel: Flux Academy

Views: 33,104

Keywords: become a web designer 2022, freelance web designer, web design, web design freelance, web design business 2022, web design freelancer, web design business, web design 2022, web designer career, web design school, ran segall, Flux academy, become a web designer 2023, Learn to build websites, how to make money building websites, how to build a design agency, webflow, framr, figma

Id: dAMgOp8I1TM

Length: 50min 43sec (3043 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023