The Truth About Owning a Web Design Agency

so here on my youtube channel it's been really easy to glamorize the life of a freelancer or an entrepreneur um and oftentimes in my videos we talk about all the money that you can make and the awesome lifestyle and that scaling your business is the only way to be successful and while those things are important in reality there are a lot of negatives about this job as well and things that i've been struggling with recently and that i've also been struggling with since the day i started my business and so in this video i want to be a little bit more transparent and talk to you about the parts of this job that just flat out suck and that are hard and take a toll on me emotionally and physically and then at the end of this video i'd like to share with you a couple things that i want to do personally to help myself find more balance and more happiness in my job and with my family and my hope is that this video will give you a little bit of motivation and also for those of you that are dealing with these same things you'll know that you're not the only one so let's get into it so like i mentioned there are a lot of benefits to owning your own business especially a business like mine where you work remotely you work from home it gives you freedom over your time you have very little overhead there are huge upsides and your ability to make a lot of money is is really huge and it's been something that i'm really grateful for because i have been able to build a good life for my family which is the whole reason that i do this so there are definitely pros to this job and i would recommend it to anybody this is a great career path but if i was just to tell you that everything is rainbows and butterflies that would be very dishonest of me because there are parts of this job that are really really difficult and that really suck now i don't feel that my job is any harder than anybody else's i know that every job comes with its difficulties but i would like to share with you some of the difficulties that i've dealt with and hopefully help you either avoid some of these or at least relate to and then share with you a couple things that i've done or i'm doing to try to overcome the struggles that i've dealt with as a freelancer and a business owner so one of the biggest struggles that i've dealt with is the pressure of running my own business now it's easy again to kind of paint the glamour of you know i've got all these clients that pay me and i have a team and we're constantly working together and building cool things and yes that's awesome and i love my team and i love my clients but in reality it's a lot of pressure that all falls on you right you've got the pressure from your clients to deliver great work you've got the pressure of a team that you need to deliver and be a leader but also you need to make sure that all of them get paid and that you yourself are getting paid and you've got to find new clients and you've got to make sure that you're making enough to cover all these expenses and there's an immense amount of pressure now that pressure does get bigger as your business grows if you're just a solo freelancer that takes on a few projects at a time that pressure is probably going to be a little bit lower but it's certainly always there now with that pressure comes a lot of risk as well as a business owner you always put yourself in a position of risk now a good example of this is say i do the the best work possible for my clients but i have one client that for some reason feels like we did something wrong or we leaked some of their information or whatever it is i could potentially be sued by a client and even if i feel that i'm innocent or didn't do anything wrong i'm gonna find myself paying legal fees to fight a lawsuit and this comes with any business right but not only do you have the risk of you know being sued anytime that you're dealing with money you run the risk of not being able to pay people or with clients you know you run the risk of not being able to deliver on your promises and and there's just a lot of risk that goes into it that i don't think it's talked about enough and so it's important that you understand that if you're going to choose this path you're going to have a lot of risk that you otherwise wouldn't deal with right if you have a regular nine to five your managers and your and your bosses and the owner of the company they're going to take on all of that risk and that's typically why they get paid more than their employees it's because of that added risk that comes with being a business owner now the next thing that i found has taken a real toll on my emotional well-being and just the balance of my life is the fact that i can never shut off my brain now a good example of this is i was spending time with uh with some friends and we were watching a movie on the weekend and i was fascinated because as i looked at all of them they were just totally relaxed and just watching this move and i could tell they didn't have a care in the world they cracked open a soda eating popcorn and i was sitting there watching that video and i could not stop thinking about work and thinking about oh no i forgot to send this email or i forgot to pay this person or that client deadline is coming up really fast and i don't know if we're gonna make it in time and i'm not able to shut off my brain and it really takes a heavy toll on me because i find myself thinking about this once i get off work around five or six i think about it through dinner i think about it through the evening when we're watching you know netflix or whatever we're doing and then i get into bed and i can't sleep because i'm thinking about work and i think this is kind of the price you pay as a business owner because the progress of the business falls solely on you and if you're not the one that's innovating and thinking of new ways to improve and get better and grow then nobody is and you are going to pay the price for that and so this is one thing that's really difficult to maintain a balance and be able to shut off your brain and stop thinking about work and give yourself a little bit of a break another huge downside to this job is loneliness this is something that i don't think i've ever really talked about before but it's really lonely to be a business owner it's even more lonely to be a business owner that works from home in your own office where you don't really get to communicate with people that often and when i think about the people that i communicate with first you know my wife and i'm super grateful because she's truly the only person that understands my business and that i can vent to and so without her i would absolutely have lost my mind already but aside from her the only people that i speak with are either my team which with your team you have to constantly be positive you can't really talk about your struggles whether it's your personal struggles or business struggles right like you have to play that role of a leader and then your clients which is the same you don't want to vent your clients about the struggles your business is having because they're not going to want to work with you and so it's easy to feel kind of boxed in or like you're on an island where you can't really vent about the struggles that you're having or the frustrations with your team or with your clients or whoever and so this can be really difficult and it can be really lonely and you have to make sure that you're constantly looking for ways to break outside of that bubble that you're in because i promise you it will drive you mad and it'll be really really difficult to maintain balance or to play that role of a positive leader or a you know a really sharp business owner with your clients because if you don't have that balance if you don't get that social release somewhere else your balance is going to be all off and you're not going to be able to fulfill those roles all right so i've talked to you about some of these struggles that i've been dealing with and i feel like if i ended the video right now it would just be a real downer and you would say okay great peyton like you just talked to us about a bunch of sad things and you didn't give us anything that we can do to resolve them now again i want to be honest that i haven't i haven't found the answer to these things but i am making goals and taking steps to make my life better and bring more balance and happiness and peace into just my day-to-day and so one of the first things that i would recommend that i'm finding is making a big difference for me is i joined a group that has you know other business owners within my state within idaho and in fact i just got back from a conference we do quarterly conferences where i drive to boise and meet with all these other business owners and we brainstorm and we vent and do you know basically just talk about what we're going through and this has been a huge huge emotional relief for me really it's just been so huge for my mental well-being and it's been great to gel and talk with other people that are going through what i'm going through right i can go in and i can say oh geez this person that i worked with was just so ridiculous or we're having cash flow problems or the types of things that you wouldn't talk to your clients or your employees about so i would highly recommend joining this type of group now this doesn't mean that you have to go join a twenty thousand dollar a year um mastermind group because i don't think that you get the same benefits with something like that but this group that i joined i think it's two thousand dollars a year and it's not a group that is designed to make them money it's it's an entrepreneurs group that is designed purely for kind of that community and camaraderie between business owners and so i would highly recommend looking into something like that because it's been a huge help for me and it's been great to have other people around me in my circle that are going through the same things now the next thing that i would advise you is don't do this for anyone else don't do this for your followers don't do this to impress the people around you really only do this for yourself and for your family and if you find yourself doing something that you feel like is not benefiting yourself or your family then don't do it if you are scaling beyond that what what you can take and you find yourself in a bad spot where you don't have time to spend with your family or you're just run down and overly depressed or anxious about work you need to dial it back and do what's best for yourself and your family and with that that brings us to my last tip which is something that i'm going to try to live by the rest of my life and the rest of the life of my business and that is always put my business ahead of my clients businesses meaning always focus on the growth of my business before the growth of my clients and even more important than that always put myself ahead of my own business and what i mean by that is i need to make sure that i'm in a good spot mentally emotionally physically before i ever spend time working in my business when i wake up i need to stop immediately going to my email and responding to emails and worried about what needs to be done that day instead i need to wake up and i need to listen to a book and i need to stretch and i need to eat a good breakfast and i need to do the things that i need to do to get myself in a good spot because at the end of the day my most valuable asset is myself and if i'm not taking care of myself everything else is going to suffer and so i promise you if you do these things it's going to help it's helping me right now again i don't have all of the answers and this job can be difficult but i definitely know that so far my life has been worth it and i hope that the videos that i put out here on youtube can always be transparent and that i can help you go through some of the things that i'm currently going through that we can kind of meet eye to eye and help each other along the way because i know that at the end of the day the most important thing is that we're finding fulfillment and success in the things that we're doing and that we're in a good spot mentally emotionally and physically so we can spend great time doing things that we love with the people that we love and it's definitely going to be worth it so again if you found this video at all helpful please be sure to hit the like button these videos are always hard to do right because i'm a little bit more open than i typically am but i appreciate you watching till the end please if you have any questions reach out to me personally i'd be happy to help any of you as best i can and we'll catch you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Payton Clark Smith

Views: 3,422

Keywords: The Truth About Owning a Web Design Agency, web design, web design business, cons of running a web design business, truth about freelancing, freelancing negatives, the negatives of freelancing, web designer, how to be happy, how to make money online, business owner, pros and cons of running a business, website design

Id: 9n_4fH8FHuc

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 03 2021