In this article, I’m going to share how we scaled our agency from 1 to 12 people. I’ll be sharing everything that helped us grow and get to where we are today so you can cut through the noise and get real advice from a company that’s actually done it.

But right before we jump in, why am I talking about this? Who am I?

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• The Pillars of Growing a WordPress Business
• Plan = Passion + Focus + Goal
• Execute = Audience + Message + Channel + System
• Maintain = Mindset + Workday
  • The Workday of The King & Queen
  • The Biggest Bottleneck – Communication
  • Build To Sell (Even If You Don’t Plan To)
• Take Action – What You Can Do Now

The Pillars of Growing a WordPress Business

Top Level: Plan, Execute & Maintain

This is an overview of the different aspects of your business that you need to consider when you’re looking to scale and manage a team of people…

Plan = Passion + Focus + Goal

Failing to plan is planning to fail, we’ve all heard that.

But in business the three things that truly the most important when running & scaling are passion, focus and the end goal.

Passion is important because by finding the type of work that you love, you’ll no longer have to dread waking up every single morning.

And, if you’re still not working with any clients, in particular, niching down is incredible because it gives you a focus that you can dedicate your efforts to and excel at. Why be a jack of all trades and a master of none when you can dominate one part of the market?

The smaller your niche, the more focused you are so that you’ore able to create a unique solution for your customers.

Put it this way, how many websites have you built in the last few months? We surveyed over 600+ professionals in the industry and found that the majority had only built a handful. So why are we trying to reach thousands, if not millions of people with our lack of focus and broad messaging?

When you choose a certain niche to focus on, this gives you the opportunity to become a true authority & expert that is more capable of being an asset to every single client that you work with.

Focus. Once you find your passion and then decide to niche down and serve this specific audience, that is going to give you focus that will allow you to basically not spread yourself too thinly doing too many things, selling to too many people, trying to figure out different solutions for different people as they come to us. Basically, the more you do, the less you chew. So clear your schedule, avoid distractions, just focus on that one thing that gives you the most pleasure in your business, because if you don’t love your business, it’s not worth it. It can easily become a nightmare.

From personal experience, there was this time when I woke up in the morning and I just hated going to work, just because I wasn’t working with the clients that I wanted to work with. By niching down to an audience that I enjoy working with, and focusing just on that, allows you to really expand and just gives you a better life.

And last but not least, is having a goal.

Let’s leave choosing a realistic goal for the accountants.

When choosing a goal in a creative business, we have to think big, so whatever the goal is for the next year you want to 10x it. It’s not enough to just think about how you can close one more deal next month or you can close two extra deals. Start working on building a system that has the potential to close 50 deals.

Simply put, goals are arbitrary. The same people will start from the same starting point, one of them will aim for $2M USD by the end of the year and others will aim to reach $20,000 at the end of the first year.

Notice the difference? The people who set themselves the high goal – although they may not reach it – they’re going to try and figure out what it takes to get there. It forces you to think bigger and beyond just yourself.

It forces you to think beyond the scale you’re comfortable with.

When I first started as a freelancer, I only wanted to get a few clients that would get me to $5,000/month. That’s a decent goal for the vast majority of people, but the moment I started thinking of how to scale to $50,000 – which we actually just reached – but it took a few years, it changed the way I thought about my agency. So it is possible, but if I hadn’t looked at it like that, I would have still been doing $2000 websites with 1-2 websites per month and stayed at that level…

A good mindset to be in when you’re setting goals is the story of the “4-minute mile”. Nobody thought it was possible, it was such a relevation when Roger Bannister finally became the first person to run a mile in 4 minutes. Beyond people thinking it was impossible, physicians and experts in the field said that it is literally impossible for the body & the body would break down if you run faster than four minutes per mile.

But Roger wasn’t having it.

He just went for it, and believe it or not a year later, another guy did it. And a year after that, a few others did it to the point where running one mile in under four minutes is something that every runner in high school can do.

Nothing much has changed; just our mindset and the way that we perceive reality and how we can look at things from our point of view. 

Execute = Audience + Message + Channel + System

Now, let’s execute.

Breaking execution down into audience, message, channel and system is a great way to make sure you’re reaching every individual goal so that you can work towards your overarching goal.

So let’s break down these four things to see how they apply.

Defining your audience will help you clarify your message but focus on the people themselves not their job titles or positions.

Niching down – which we discussed earlier – is usually approached with focusing on a specific mindset. what does this guy do? What is the industry that I want to be a part of? I’m going to work with real estate people, I’m going to work with charities. I, on the other hand, think it’s incredibly valuable to look at people and ask people, not at job titles.

We’re all doing some variation of the same thing, but every single person that reads this post is unique in their own right (including you ?). The aim is to be able to start a conversation with someone, find an instant connection, identify a problem you want to fix and then fix it for everyone that has the problem that you have the best solution for.

Next is messaging. Your message is your offer.

We build websites is what you’re doing, but a website isn’t an end result, it’s not the goal for the client – it’s simply a means to an end. You should aim to think beyond that.

Why is what you’re doing worth $5,000 or $10,000 and how can you wrap it up as an end solution?

WordPress is just a tool just like a guitar is.

You can buy the best guitar in the world but if you don’t know how to play it, it’s arguably worthless (to you). So it’s about finding that offer that speaks to the person you’re targeting.

Now that we’ve discussed finding your message and finding your audience – let’s talk about your channel & the process of actually finding them.

Finding prospects is always a challenge for all of us, we basically just want to build websites. We want to be creative and do excellent work for our clients but before we can do that we actually need to spend the time finding clients, following up with them, and invoicing them.

So, where do you find clients?

This becomes a lot easier when you have the right audience and have niched down, so we highly advise that you focus on nailing those aspects of your business before moving onto this step.

But, once you know your audience and understand who they are – I’ve found LinkedIn to be the most reliable place to network & find clients. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are all definitely also worth looking into at some point but especially when getting started you want to focus on excelling at one channel. Choose the channel that makes the most sense based on where the people you are after are rather than where you want to be. We won’t cover a complete LinkedIn strategy in this post, because that would be a 4,000+ word guide on its own, but we recommend checking out Lemlist’s detailed guide.

And last but definitely not least is your system.

From day 1 or day N (where N is whatever day you’re at today), start mapping out the entire process from a lead contacting you and converting into a client all the way to launching their website.

You’ll definitely have to accept that your processes won’t be perfect to begin with, they will be rough. And like every machine, you’ll have to optimize it and keep putting in work to make sure that it runs smoothly.

Let me briefly walk you through how my LinkedIn outreach process works. I make my profile look awesome for my audience, rather than for me. Once I have my profile set up properly, then we search to find the right people and send a personalized introductory message.

Then once they reply, we proceed to build the relationship and start looking deeper into their profile and what it is that they do. At this point, there are basically only three outcomes – either you found the decision-maker, or they’re not interested.

So if you’ve found the decision-maker, you should have that message ready to send. How are you able to help then & why does it provide them value? Of course, adding that you’d understand if they aren’t interested.

While this outreach process isn’t ideal and in an ideal world the leads would be inbound (rather than outbound), when you’re starting out you need to put in the effort to get to that point. So don’t get hung up on the rejections you get, keep the relationship going but find more people.

The best way to get peoples’ time of day is not trying to sell to them directly, you want to make an initial connection and build that relationship. And if it clicks, then they’ll come to you. If you let the person reach the conscious decision that they need to work with you on your own, then they will require little to no convincing or selling at all.

In the past, you’d get a message request almost always after someone connects with a full-on sales pitch where the person tries to close you without even knowing anything about them. Please do not be this person.

The connection has to be personal, it’s not about shouting what you can do. As the name suggests on LinkedIn, it’s about connecting with that person.

If you truly know what you’re looking for and the market that you’re able to serve, finding the people to get in touch with is easy so it really becomes a matter of just doing it. When you come across someone that’s interested, you move them further down the process and proceed to book a call with them. Over time, you’ll build a list of the most frequent questions that come up in the discovery call and can put together a survey to send out to these leads. This is a great way to filter out the leads that aren’t truly serious about working with you (once you have interested leads to filter out).

One question that we recommend including in this survey which far too many people leave out is asking whether they have the money to work with you. This doesn’t have to be blunt, there is a way to ask it in an elegant way – here’s an example:

It’s surprising how many people never ask this question and continue to spend time pursuing leads that are never going to work with them anyway.

Based on their initial responses to these questions, if it is a good fit, you should reach back out to them to let them know that you have availability and would be open to discussing their project further & continue with the rest of your sales process as usual.

Our profile as we’ve seen in step one is already designed for this particular audience. So if you know who your audience is and your messaging is proper, they will go to your profile, they will see what you’re doing, they will say “This is what I’m looking for!” So that’s why they come to you with interest, even after just saying “Hi, thanks for connecting!” They’ll check out your profile and come back to you. That’s perfect.

And if they haven’t, that’s when you make the offer. We still won.

If you want to execute this process, you have to think big. Not everyone in the industry will be open to connecting. The way I see it, we have ten thousand sure outcomes to a full digit combination lock. But if one of the things is not right, you can have three of them right, which is still useless.

If something’s not right, the whole thing doesn’t work. Usually, this is when people give up, they try three times and are out of the game. Understanding that there are 10,0000 possibilities gives you so much more leeway, just try again. If I’ve only tried something 5 times, I still have 9,9995 tries to go before I give up.

This doesn’t mean try the same thing over and over again (this is the definition of insanity).

When something doesn’t work a few times, we want to change just one number at a time. if we change more than one thing at a time it’s difficult to keep track of what worked. So if it doesn’t work, try refining the message slightly be changing small parts of it. If that doesn’t work the message might not be right for the person you’re trying to reach or perhaps it isn’t the place for the type of people that you’re trying to reach.

Maintain = Mindset + Workday

Now we’re at the final stage, maintaining.

In business, it’s so common to take incredibly long to execute. As an agency, when you start having clients coming in, you need to serve them. The level of responsibility surrounding their project and business is very unlike any other business out there. When you’re an employee at the company, you have much more leeway, but as an agency, clients expect a lot more from you (even if they pay less than they pay employees).

Workday Of The Kings & Queens

Time is our most valuable resource.

Nothing in this world is more precious than the time you are investing in your own business and into your personal life. It just flies by, which is why we want to maximize its use in focusing on being a CEO, acting as a leader in your business. Not on support tickets or requests.

The Biggest Bottleneck – Communication

It’s natural that in the early days of scaling, when you take on more business your profitability will usually (if not always) take a hit in one way or another. This was one of the most difficult things to accept for me.

There’s no way to avoid it if you want to build a real business that doesn’t live and breathe only when you do (often referred to as economies of scale).

You will feel really weird when your revenue initially doubles, but you yourself aren’t actually taking home double. The solution to this is scaling beyond this awkward position that most agencies face right before the founders burn out.

And if you run a WordPress agency, that is something you can avoid with effective client communication – single-handedly the biggest time-waster in an agency. Depending on the type of clients that your agency works with, the reason this is typically the case is that you and your clients are on two completely different wavelenght.s.

You know everything about web design, how to refer to a certain part of a page, but some clients don’t even know what a menu is or a hero area is. This is why your processes should be fool-proof and client-centric rather than designed for your use only.

There’s three basic processes in any website:

1. You need to request content. 
2. You need to improve the design. 
3. You need to provide support.

Getting content from clients is a nightmare.

They don’t know what exactly you want and have no idea how to send it your way. Everything breaks down when this miscommunication starts occurring. They create huge Word documents or in the best-case a Google Sheet with explanations including screenshots trying to use arrows to point at what part of a page that they’re referring to.

The step beyond this that most agencies eventually try is some project management system like Trello or Asana. But this just brings in more confusion because they own’t know how to use those tools in thae way you expect them to. Those tools are about you, they’re not helpful for the client.

When you’re looking at a website, we see code, we see the design, we see the specifics colors and they just see a completely one-dimensional screen.

This is why we built Atarim.

As an agency, we spent countless hours trying to decode what clients were trying to explain in endless email chains and long Word documents. We were sick of it so we build a feedback widget that lets clients interact with you directly on the site they hired you to build.

In the most intuitive way possible.

Using Atarim makes it feel as if the client is standing right next to you, actually pointing at your screen and asking you to change something specifically. All of the information – automatic screenshots, browser, and device information – is all automatically sent you never have to ask them for something in order to be able to replicate an issue on your end.

Build To Sell (Even If You Don’t Plan To)

I’m not here to tell you that you have to sell your business, but building an agency in a way that it is ready to sell whenever you want to is a great way to make sure that you are not the center of the business you’re running.

Especially in the early-stages it’s very typical to be a complete control freak with your business and want to do absolutely everything because you can do it better than everyone else. I can assure you that isn’t the case.

You really have to lose that mindset if you want to scale. The way to tell that you have a truly scalable business model is if you are ready to be sold at any given moment.

Take Action – What You Can Do Now

Let’s summarize. In short, there are two ways to grow your career in the WordPress industry. As a freelancer and as an agency.

The biggest mistake is when people start having an identity crisis and can’t figure out which one they want to be. There is nothing wrong with being a freelancer, we aren’t trying to say you have to scale beyond yourself, there are a number of people who have been successful without doing so.

As a freelancer, you can continue to be involved in the technical side of things and you also work with clients on a small scale which is great for understanding your position in that kind of business-client relationship.

You have to go through this process to understand whether you want to build upon it and scale at some point.

Once you manage clients on a larger scale, you start focusing on your business at a higher level. As an agency, think of every website you build for a client as a standalone product. And you do 3, 5 or 10 product launches per month. The agency model has its advantages but it also has this glass ceiling that people are talking about. Some people have broken this glass ceiling, but it’s a huge uphill battle to go beyond $20,000/month. If it would be easy, then far more people would be running such large agencies.

If you want to scale beyond this stage, you really have to act like someone that doesn’t know any part of the process but are capable of managing and motivating your team, how to work with accountants and lawyers but beyond that, you shouldn’t be getting involved in day-to-day client work anymore.

Ask yourself: where do you want to be in five years?

Out of everything covered in this article, this is the single most important thing. What do you actually want your business to look like?

If you make sure the process is covered (with solid, scalable systems), you know how to manage a team, and are able to consistently land clients you enjoy working with – you’re on the right track.

When it comes to maintaining long-term work relationships with your clients, communication is the best way to stand out. It truly is the difference between having clients that will be with you for 15 years and those that move on immediately after they finish their first project with you.

This is where most freelancers and agencies fall short because it’s easy to solely focus on deliverables. But falling into this state of mind as a business owner is what will, unfortunately, not lead to a memorable experience and will make you easy to replace.

Rest assured – here at Atarim, we’re dedicated to helping WordPress design & development businesses scale by managing effective & peaceful client communication. Overall helping them reduce overall project completion time. In this article, we’ll outline simple yet essential client communication rules that we’ve learned the hard way along my journey from a 1 to a 12-person WordPress web design agency…

Take Your Time to Familiarize Yourself With Your Clients

Long story short: Every client is different.

From the moment you first interact with a new lead, subconsciously take note of how they communicate, what their average response time is, and gauge what they would, in turn, expect from you if you are to eventually work together.

Taking the time to understand the principles of how they communicate with you provides valuable insight into the way they’d expect you to communicate with them too. While we’re not suggesting that you should meet every demand that they have and completely communicate on their terms, it’s a great way to ensure client expectations are on the same level.

Aside from this, there’s even more to learn from clients that you’ve been working with for a longer time. Make sure to go through previous projects you’ve done with them and take note of preferences they’ve made in the past with regards to things as simple as where invoices should be sent and what timezones they’re in so you don’t keep asking the same question over and over again. As your team grows, it’s important to store such information in a centralized location such as a CRM or Google Sheet so that anyone can access it and refer to it during the course of a project.

Be Open 

A crucial thing to keep in mind when it comes to your client relationships – much like any other – is to be completely straightforward with them.

Businesses love it when agencies and freelancers are transparent with their process and keep them in the loop throughout. Showing them that you’re not just trying to make work sound more complicated than it actually is really matters because there are a lot of bad actors out there. Similarly, don’t take transparency too far, most of the time clients aren’t really interested in how you do things – all they really care about is the outcome and timeline, so anything which could affect that should be communicated with them in a timely manner.

Learn How To React to Their Feedback

Maintaining confidence with clients is sometimes more difficult than it seems. During the course of working together, clients will often jump in with their own suggestions on what the best way to do what they’re asking you to do is. This may be like they’re telling you how to do your job but remember, although they hired you (as an expert) to complete a job for them you still need to be respectful of their suggestions.

And after all, if you really are sure of yourself, responding to their comments or suggestions should be easy to do…

Even if the end product you’ll be delivering is good, they may still have preferences on certain aspects of the project (which is their right), so do not be abrupt and disregard any suggestions that they make. Regardless of whether you completely disagree with your client’s suggestions, let them know why and have distinct boundaries.

One such example for a WordPress web design agency would, for example, be to not use whatever theme the client asks you to. A response to that could be something along the line of

“Hey, I completely understand why you might want to use [theme name], but I have more experience with [personal theme preference] and would only be able to deliver our best possible work if we are to use it…“

If you’re in the early stages of your business replying with statements such as the above can seem daunting and you really shouldn’t do it unless you’re in a position where losing a client that isn’t the best possible fit is something that you’re comfortable with – especially financially.

When it comes to the simplest of conflicts, they couldn’t be easier to resolve:

1. Identify whether you’re willing to adapt.
2. Let them know why you’d prefer to do things differently and how it would benefit them at the end.
3. And most importantly, don’t push it – coming across as someone who is against change, unable to receive feedback and criticism is unprofessional.
   
   If you disagree, there has to be a specific reason and logic behind it, not just an outright rejection of something you’re unfamiliar with.

Put Yourself in Their Shoes

Clients have their own obligations, problems and life. This is especially true when you’re working with larger companies where your point of contact may not be the business owner – and will in turn be someone who is acting as a middleman (or woman) to pass messages along which leads to important information being lost in the process…

When you show the client and even explicitly say to them that you understand the situation that you’re in so you can work to develop a cordial relationship with your main point of contact, this is the most rewarding approach in the long-term. Clients will feel as if you know their business, and understand the way things work there so moving on to work with another agency or freelancer would seem like too much of a hassle because that’s a learning curve that they would have to go through all over again.

Adapt to the way that you communicate with them. If they are informal with the way they address you, you should do the same. If they are extremely formal, and you are trying to play it safe, then you should maintain the same level of formality.

Honestly, I had no idea how much of an impact this had on communication and understanding, but not following this for the longest time led to clients feeling as if we were cold or just simply not on the same wavelength as their team. The moment I adopted their informal style of communication, their entire team welcomed me with open arms and started to treat me as a business partner rather than just some outsourced contractor.

Be Polite

While the previous section about adapting to the communication style of your clients is important, this doesn’t mean you should ditch everything you believe in.

Especially when there is a language barrier clients may often skip basic politeness once they’ve known you for a longer time (because it’s essentially implied), but this doesn’t mean you should do the same.

Don’t shy away from using words like ‘thank you’, ‘excuse me’ and please, and even overuse them. These simple prompts in written communication are essential in showing your clients they’re a valued customer and you care what they say.

Even in situations where your clients are very direct, you should always match them with your standard tone of communication on that front. It’s not uncommon for clients to be pushy, overdemanding, and controlling especially when it comes to timeline and unrealistic expectations. While initially, it can seem that they aren’t respecting you or your time, the best way for them to notice this and come back down to earth is for you to communicate as you normally would.

Be Reliable & Consistent

The Key To Being Great Is Just Being Good But Consistently

One of the biggest client communication pitfalls is lack of consistency. Businesses want to work with people and other businesses that they can rely on. If your response rate is 24 hours one week, it can’t be 4 days the next week.

This fluctuation although natural on your end will come across as unreliable to clients so you need to deliver on the expectations you set from day 1. We’ve all fallen victim to setting high expectations and over-delivering in the early days of working with clients in an effort to impress them, but all this really does is harm us in the long-term because we set unrealistic expectations.

Changing the way you communicate with your clients frequently will make you appear unreliable, inconsistent and they just all-round won’t know what to expect which is obviously something you wish to avoid as it may make the client look elsewhere for their next project.

Show Up On Time

When it comes to time, this really goes without saying. but you have to respect your clients’ time. Make plans so you can be ready for meetings 5-10 minutes before they start to get into the right mindset and pull up anything you need to have ready for meetings. Being late gives the impression that you’re not taking them seriously which is obviously something you want to avoid.

Show You Care With Personalized Communication

As a service provider, it’s important that you develop an image when addressing clients and potential clients.

One way of showing that you’re different from the average service provider is showing clients or potential clients that you care. I consistently stay in touch with leads, and share industry news or information that they likely missed so they can capitalize on it (even if it is without my help). Being present for clients and potential clients to show them that you care stands out from the rest which only really care about doing work that is going to make a difference on the bottom line.

Obviously making money is extremely important, but when you reach the point where you can invest time into doing things that you believe in – i.e. what I would refer to as business development, that’s what will truly impress clients and make you an asset to their internal team.

Be Clear About Where Communication Happens

Inevitably all agencies and freelancers will need to use email. As much as we try to get away from it, it’s always going to be there because it’s the standard way to send invoices to clients and it’s the way businesses communicate with their accountants.

But, the most common mistake we see agencies make which leads to massive growing pains down the line is not using a centralized system like Atarim to handle client requests.

If you don’t keep this in check before you know it, you’ll end up using Slack, Trello, Basecamp, Teamwork, and 15 other services to communicate with all of the clients you have and managing everything across all these services is impossible to scale.

Take your time to develop an effective way to communicate with your clients. Create email lists for separate clients and projects. Make regular use of social media for your existing as well as potential clients – and don’t be afraid to be present on as many of these as possible. Be always available to your clients. 

Atarim helps you maintain communication with your clients and makes it easy for them to get in touch with you directly from your website. With it managing dozens of websites and the most difficult of clients becomes easy and agencies reduce project completion time by an average of two weeks.

Jump Straight To The Point With BLUF – A Military Communication Standard

BLUF is an acronym used by the military – it stands for “bottom line up front” – and is a communication standard designed to enforce speed and clarity.

In principle, it’s very simple. Put the most important details that you can’t afford anyone to miss first. Don’t tease or wait before revealing your main point because people are busy and their time is valuable.

And always provide context. Whether you’re asking for help or organizing a call, the BLUf communications standard internally and with clients reduces the amount of mental energy the recipient of one of your messages needs to do to help you. This is a brilliant example of what not to do:

1:54 PM Hey, I need your help.

1:55 PM I have a question.

Asking someone a simple question like this just to gauge whether they’re available might not seem like it takes a lot of time but add up dozens, if not 100s of these per day or week and it adds up. Every time a notification like this pops up it takes their attention away from focused work leading to sloppy communication which becomes a huge waste of time.

What does this look like in practice?

Hey – quick question do you have any examples of web design agencies that are using Atarim as an integral part of their agency?

Nope – while this isn’t a huge waste of time like the first example, it still lacks important context that is essential to allow the recipient to fully help you.

Hey – quick question: do you know of any good examples of web design agencies that are using Atarim as an integral part of their agency? I’m looking for some examples that we can use for future case studies and some insight into the more engaged customers would be extremely helpful.

Note that, the context is important but it still doesn’t come first.

When the context comes before the “bottom line” (hence the name bottom line up front) the recipient of your message won’t get why the context is even important to them. But once they know what you need, they’ll care about why you need it so that they can tailor their response to what it is that you need something for as well as provide anything else that may be of use to you instead of providing something that may not be a good fit for what it is that you’re looking for.

Good Communication Leads To Exceptional Client Experiences

Communicating expectations and changes with your clients is definitely one of the more difficult parts of working with clients. It takes time to get right and you have to start from scratch with each new client.

Efficient client communication becomes even more difficult as you work with dozens of clients at the same time. If you’re interested in learning more about how to use Atarim, check out this post where we showcase 4 unique ways agencies and freelancers can use Atarim with clients…

You’re halfway through designing a website and you receive feedback from your client to make some changes. A small tweak here and a small tweak there, because “It won’t take long” or better yet, they say “It should be really easy to implement”…

And in most cases, this is true. The “small” changes or modifications would help make the final website better. But they can quickly add up, sometimes equating to be an extra few weeks of unpaid work for your team. 

It isn’t uncommon for web designers to decide to go the extra mile to impress their clients. After all, keeping clients happy is always the goal. But, if you’ve ever suddenly ended up way behind on your schedule, panicking and failing to get that sweet final payment to clear, you’ve become the victim of what is known as scope creep. 

What Exactly is Scope Creep?

Scope creep occurs when changes or updates are added to a project beyond what was initially agreed upon, resulting in uncontrollable growth of the scope of the project. 

Of course, changes are inevitable in every web design project. Yet there is a difference between healthy and unhealthy changes, the ones that would make your project far too large or complex. The process is often subtle, i.e. it creeps up on you and on the agreed scope, hence the name – scope creep.

But scope creep can come in a variety of forms, not just small changes. It can also come in the form of requests for bigger changes, such as your client asking you to change the whole homepage structure that you designed. To them it might seem like what they’re asking for is reasonable, but to you, it probably means that the last few weeks were literally nothing more than a waste of time.

Why is Scope Creep So Dangerous?

If you’re working on a fixed-price project, it’s easy to understand what the immediate implications are – more work for free. However, scope creep does not just mean extra work for free, it has a number of other consequences. 

Scope creep can put extra pressure on your entire team, who would find it difficult to meet the original deadlines. Even when changes that have a significant impact on workload are introduced, clients will often still expect the project to remain on track. This in turn can affect your team’s mental and physical health in a detrimental way, increasing stress that in the worst-case scenario could result in employee burnout. Overworked employees might grow resentful and start looking for another job. 

At the same time, severe employee burnout may lead to your project completely stalling out. That being said, in general, the biggest side-effect of scope creep is that the project just drags on for weeks if not months on end without you ever being able to finalize anything and collect the final payment from your client for all the work you’ve done.

Finally, if you are required to do extra work and meet unreasonable deadlines, the whole quality of your work can suffer. This way, you risk damaging the reputation you’ve worked so hard to build…

Keep Scope Creep in Check By Keeping Clients Under Control

If you’ve done work as a web design freelancer or within an agency, you are likely to have experienced scope creep. Some amount of scope creep can happen to any project, no matter how well-designed the project is or how highly qualified the team is. 

However, there are steps that you can take in order to avoid it fully overtaking your project.

1. Write a Clear Statement/Scope of Work

You can’t expect to keep something within its scope if you aren’t quite sure what this scope is, to begin with. So make sure you understand your clients’ goals, vision, and expectations. The requirements, timeline, budget, and responsibilities (who is doing what) should be clearly outlined in the statement or scope of work.

The scope of work can be used both externally, with your client, but also internally, within the project team itself. In other words, a jointly agreed scope of work allows you to ensure that everyone is on the same page. 

It may sound simple, but a huge part of scope creep stems precisely from a poorly defined scope of work or lack thereof altogether.

Things to keep in mind when writing your scope of work:

1. Make sure the language is simple and unambiguous to avoid any possible misunderstanding – especially if your client is not very familiar with web design. 
2. Make sure to include a clause that clearly states that any work your client may require outside of the initially agreed scope of the project will incur them an additional charge (perhaps at a standard hourly rate even if you generally don’t charge hourly, just to account for the odd extra 5-10 hours per project).

By keeping in mind these 2 fundamental concepts when writing your scope of work, you protect yourself from potentially demanding clients that may try to take advantage of you along the way and avoid unnecessary conflicts surrounding the final cost. 

2. Plan for Changes Ahead of Time

Above all, it’s important to distinguish between adjustments that are harmless and take very little time to implement and adjustments that would change the project deadline entirely.

It would be naive to expect there to be no requests for changes whatsoever, whether from your client, your team, or even you personally. But you need to make sure you have a proper plan in place for how to handle any proposed changes. 

For starters, establish who will be in charge of approving such changes – would it be you? Would it be a project manager? Or would it just be your client assigning work directly to your team? We really don’t recommend letting your client have a direct line of access to just add new tasks to your team’s plate because it wouldn’t be unheard of for something like this to go unnoticed until the end. Once the client is familiar with the protocol for giving feedback on the progress of their website, everyone can be on the same page and the results are transparency and better communication among everyone involved.

3. Use Atarim – Software Is On Your Side

For everything we covered above, and to top it all off – we highly recommend making use of a project management solution that allows you to properly keep track of everything that happens during the initial web design process as well as afterwards. 

Why keep tasks & clients separate from the actual website you’re working on? 

One of the main reasons we built Atarim was when our founder, Vito Peleg, grew his agency and realized a recurring issue that kept coming up, again and again, that was really holding him back from growing. Especially when juggling multiple projects at a time, the inability to properly keep track of everything, discuss changes with clients, and get your team involved resulted in projects that took far longer than expected. 

Simply put, most clients just don’t know how to express themselves. They don’t know what really goes into building a website, what each section is called. All they know is what they currently see and whatever they’re picturing in their head.

With Atarim’s Visual Feedback feature, not only can you help get those ideas out of their head but you can also keep track of every single change in a single dashboard, including tracking the extra time the ones that added to the scope of the project took so that you can bill them back to the client. 

Breaking down changes into individual tasks and action items not only helps you do exactly what the client wants, it helps keep your team focused and reduces project completion time by an average of 50%. 

When using Atarim, just remember to enforce communication through the set channels. For instance, if a client sends you a message via Facebook Messenger or sends a long email, it’s important to refer them back to the agreed method of communication. Even if it feels like you risk annoying the client, assure them that they’ll thank you in the long term because using Atarim to communicate with you is what’s going to help move the project forward and help you do your best work instead of spending hours finding information spread across 5 different tools.  

4. Learn To Say “No”

Clients and other people involved in the web design process might be more likely to make unreasonable demands if they perceive weak leadership or lack of experience on your end. This is what makes it even more important for you to stand up and not be afraid to say no to unreasonable client demands that would put the project and your ability to deliver work to this client (and all of your other clients) at risk.

If a client or boss is asking you to take on additional tasks that can inflate the scope of the project, simply try to explain in a professional, but firm way that these tasks go beyond the agreed scope of work and therefore affect the timeframe and cost that they incur.

5. Steer Clear of Gold Plating

Another widespread misconception is that scope creep is always caused by the client themselves.

This actually isn’t always the case and it isn’t uncommon for scope creep to come from your end. In fact, gold plating is a practice where you or your team just keep working on the client’s website in order to make marginal improvements without the explicit approval from your client. In general, this is the result of poor project management and planning.

A great example of gold plating is when you keep adding additional work onto your own plate just to impress the client or exceed their expectations. Now there are situations in which this makes sense and obviously, the client isn’t going to object to the additional effort you put in, but this will result in scope creep and can negatively affect your business.

What causes gold plating?

Usually, gold plating can be attributed to a desire to please the customer, assuming that they will be delighted to see additional features that they didn’t even ask for in the first place. However, a real risk here is that instead of ecstatic, your client might end up disappointed and not approve of the additional features. They might even ask you to redo the project according to their original specifications, which again, leads to extra free work for you. After all, they didn’t ask for the changes you made, so they are unlikely to pay you to remove them.

Another issue to be on the lookout for is perfectionism, either from yourself or anyone in your team. Perfectionism is among the top causes of scope creep. There are the so-called chronic gold platers who will keep on pushing for all sorts of minor tweaks that should perfect the project. They are usually very hardworking and enthusiastic about the work. 

A neat way to deal with chronic gold platers is to encourage them to express their ideas and visions in the early stages of planning, where the scope of the project is still being established, i.e. before the budget is determined. By doing so, their ideas can be incorporated at the very start.

Summary – Avoid Scope Creep & Finish Projects Faster

Scope creep is inevitable with some clients but if you don’t plan for it and without the proper systems in place to deal with it (such as Atarim ? ) it can cause the project to end in complete disaster.  

With the advice in this guide, you’ll be on the right track to prevent scope creep from affecting your work in the first place and minimize the effects in the event that it still does. 

Your website is the face of your business.

Now more than ever users not only expect it to be available all the time, they expect it to load in no more than two seconds.

So just imagine if performance can have such a huge impact on your bottom line, what would happen if your entire site became inaccessible?

If your website is down (inaccessible) to users, the months of hard work you put into design, development, and content won’t help you…

In this post, we’ll cover what website downtime is, the ways it hurts your business as well as how you can deal with it from a technical perspective to prevent it from happening.

What Is Website Downtime?

Website downtime is when both first-time visitors or existing customers try to access your website and can’t get it to load, making it impossible for them to sign up for your services, purchase your product or get in touch with you.

Evidently, whether momentarily or prolonged, this can be detrimental for your business.

Why Is Downtime Bad For Your Business?

Your Search Engine Rankings Suffer ?

The longer your server takes to respond, the more Google may limit the number of URLs it crawls on your website. So, as you’d expect, extended periods of downtime can cause your search engine rankings to suffer which will mean all of your hard work will have gone to waste.

Recovering and building back up can take time.

You Lose Credibility ?‍♂️

A business website that can’t keep itself available & fast will quickly lose credibility especially if this is the main place where customers & potential customers interact with your business.

You Lose Money ?

This is true for all websites but especially true for eCommerce websites. If your site goes down will someone is mid-checkout, the chances of them trying to purchase your product or service again and going through the whole process all over again are extremely low.

In this scenario, you can almost always guarantee that you’ll be losing money whether directly (lost customers) or indirectly (damaged brand reputation)…

The resulting downtime can also cause huge business losses – by reducing engagement, lowering conversions and sales, and ultimately, affecting customer trust and brand loyalty. 

Common Website Downtime Causes

Website crashes and downtime can occur due to several reasons.

Sometimes it can be something as simple as human error such as accidental file deletion or making a mistake when editing a file. However, oftentimes it can be caused by things out of your direct control like hosting and malware…

Hosting Issues

Low-quality, unreliable web hosting is by far the most common cause of website downtime. You can build an incredibly high-performing website and host it with web hosts that will be incapable of keeping your website fast let alone online.

All in all, the simplest way to put it is that there are plenty of web hosts to choose from but not all of them provide the same level of service and security. Even among those that take ample measures to ensure security and performance, there are times when web hosts have run into problems that caused sites on their platform to experience downtime…

Here are some of the common problems you might face with your web hosting provider:

• Your host server could itself be hacked or compromised by a successful hack or malware attack
• Overloading of the hosting server, due to a spike in traffic or engagement,  particularly if you are on shared hosting 
• Data centers and servers could be affected by software issues, power outages, electrical or mechanical problems, or even natural disasters 

Plugin/Theme Incompatibility Issues

In general, WordPress websites are powered by a combination of different WordPress core versions, themes, and plugins…

When new versions of the WordPress core, as well as themes & plugins, are released, updates can occasionally lead to incompatibility issues that may crash your website or cause the infamous WordPress white screen of death.

These issues are very easy to resolve as long as you have the proper process in place to do so, in the next section we’ll be taking a look at how to deal with website downtime…

Malware or Imminent Hack

The one small side-effect of WordPress being the most powerful and most popular content management system available, powering over 1/3rd of the entire web is that it has become a popular target for hackers.

Inevitably, malware and attempted hacks can cause your site to be taken offline or crash in a number of ways:

• When hackers break into your site, they usually inject malware. This can slow down your website and make it unresponsive as hackers drain your website’s resources to run their malicious activities. 
• Many times, hackers cleverly disguise and hide their hacks from the site owner making it hard to detect. If the hack is active for a while, Google will detect it and blacklist your website immediately. They do this to protect users on their platform from being exposed to any risks a hacked website poses.
• Your web host could also temporarily suspend your website if it detects any malware or any other infection in your site. This is a precaution hosts take in order to safeguard their platform and other websites that they host.
• Lastly, in case of a brute force or DDoS attack, hackers overload your website’s server with traffic requests which leads to a site crash.

How To Deal With Website Downtime?

Luckily, there are ways to prevent your site from facing these issues. In this article,  we discuss the three most common reasons for WordPress site crashes and five easy ways of preventing them. Let’s get started.  

1. Implement Alerts

Before you can do absolutely anything about your website becoming inaccessible, you need to be aware of when it actually happens.

Fortunately, there are a number of excellent paid & free tools that can handle uptime monitoring for you – our personal favorites are ManageWP & the WPMU DEV Hub, but other options include:

• updown.io 
• downnotifier.com 
• Uptime 
• Pingdom 
• Uptime Robot
• Freshping
• StatusCake

Having a simple system like this is important because it makes sure you can stay on top of when one of your own or one of your clients’ websites becomes inaccessible and act quickly.

2. Communicate Well

If it’s a client site that goes down, don’t try to hide it from them especially if something you did resulted in the downtime.

Message them as soon as you become aware of the downtime to let them know that you’re already working on it and will push a fix shortly. Client communication is incredibly important to maintaining a good relationship with them and retaining them, so the last thing you want to do is for them to find out that the site went down themselves.

3. Switch To A Reliable Web Host

As we mentioned, website crashes can be a problem if your site is hosted on a shared hosting platform. Shared hosts divide their host server resources and bandwidth among multiple websites. This can affect your website performance. 

If you are constantly facing an unresponsive website or slow website speeds and performance despite having it optimized and well-designed, it’s probably time to switch to better web host providers like Bluehost, or Cloudways. 

As an alternative, opt for managed hosting like Kinsta. While more expensive than shared hosting, it allocates dedicated server resources just for your site and even offers 24/7 customer support for any issues. 

4. Keep Your Website Secure & Up-to-date

Just like gardeners use pesticides or insecticides to keep pests away from plants, you need security tools that can protect your website from malware and other security risks.

A well-designed and comprehensive security strategy is an absolute must for every website. You can choose from a variety of WordPress security tools that can quickly detect any malware on your site and also remove them to clean your site.

Here are a few things to look for in a good security plugin: 

• Automated, periodic, and in-depth website scanning
• Easy cleaning of detected malware and website restoration
• A built-in firewall that can block requests from bad or suspicious IP addresses.
• Easy configuring of website hardening measures as recommended by WordPress 

Security plugins like MalCare and Sucuri offer all of these features and more at competitive prices. 

You can also deploy other security measures like SSL certification for increased security. We also recommend that you enforce strong passwords and change them periodically to protect your site from brute force attacks.

As mentioned earlier, always keep your site updated with the latest versions of WordPress along with plugins/themes. 

If you are managing multiple WP sites, deploy a good website management tool like WPCentral to centrally apply bulk updates to all your sites. In some instances, applying updates across multiple versions can cause website crashes or incompatibility issues. To avoid this, take a complete backup of your website and database files so that your site can be quickly restored in case the update runs into such problems. 

In addition, it’s always a good idea to use a staging site to first test all these updates. That way, you could avoid potentially inconveniencing your visitors and customers on the live site. Setting up a staging site manually each time can mean some additional effort. Fortunately, backup plugins like BlogVault, also offer integrated staging options that are easy to set up and use. Once you’re satisfied with the changes, you can directly merge the changes with the live site.  

5. Make Regular Backups

Besides the supportive ecosystem and active WordPress Community, free plugins/themes are one of the reasons that make WordPress so popular. Take any WordPress site, and you will find a host of plugins/themes installed to improve its look, feel, and functionality.  

However, installing too many of them, especially ones from untrusted sites makes your site vulnerable to attacks and website crashes. Outdated or low-quality plugins/themes can even slow down your website and negatively impact its performance. 

Periodically, take stock of all your installed plugins/themes and remove those that you are no longer using. Additionally, get rid of all abandoned plugins/themes from your site that are no longer being maintained by their developers. If you have installed any nulled or pirated versions of themes and plugins, delete them from your site immediately as they are often riddled with malware.

That brings us to an end on the common causes of WordPress website crashes. Before we wrap up, we would like to give you an important tip to ensuring your website is safe even in the event of a website crash. 

The first priority when your website has crashed is to restore it to normalcy. You can only do this if you have taken regular backups of your website files and database records.

While there are different ways to backup a WordPress site, there are challenges. Manual backups can be taxing and require technical knowledge. Backups from your host aren’t always reliable either.  Thus, cloud-based backup plugins are a good investment as they automate the entire backup process for periodic backups and also securely store multiple versions in independent cloud locations. They are easy to set up and use, and you can use them for daily or real-time backups of your website.

However, a backup is only as good as its ability to be restored. Common problems with most backup services are complex restore processes and the risk of restoring a corrupted backup version. It’s important to choose a trusted backup plugin like BlogVault that has a test-restore function coupled with an auto-restore process that is guaranteed to work.

Summary – Dealing With Website Downtime Professionally

Website downtime at some point is inevitable. That’s why it’s important to get ready for when it does happen especially if you manage websites for your clients. With the tools, services, and process explained in this post, you’ll have everything you need to ensure that you can not only restore your website but do so incredibly efficiently.

It’s time to turn website downtime from your worst nightmare to a simple fix with the proper measures and tools in place.

Have we missed out any important tools or methods you’ve used to reduce your website downtime? How do you handle downtime?

Here at Atarim, we have one primary goal. To help web design freelancers and agency owners succeed and scale their business.

Our effort to do so is two-fold. We primarily do this with our software that simplifies & organizes client communication for web designers. But, we also do so with blog posts just like this one.

As you might’ve guessed in this post, we’ll be answering one of the most commonly asked questions:

How do I find web design clients?

This is a long post but, rest assured, by the end of it – you’ll have absolutely everything you need to prospect & land qualified leads for your agency or freelance web design business.

There is an inherent difference between finding leads & clients. A lead is a potentially qualified prospect where no transaction has taken place yet, so let’s start with the first part of the process – getting leads.

What We Won’t Be Covering In This Post is cold calling.

Not because it’s a strategy that you can’t have success with, you most certainly can and there are people that do but we prefer and recommend generating a system that results in a consistent stream of inbound leads because it’s a long-term solution rather than an interim solution that’s only temporary.

1. The Basics

When I say basics, I mean things like:

1. A website
2. Social profiles
3. And the ability to deliver work + a simple process

Some argue you don’t need a website at all and should focus all of your time on finding clients, and others argue you need to spend weeks on end perfecting your website, brand, and social presence without landing clients.

You’ll be glad to hear that there is a better way. And it’s a mixture of the two. Not many people know this but I actually ran my agency for over a year without having a website or brand in place.

Was this ideal? Nope.

Would I do it again? Nope.

So, let’s learn from my mistakes.

If I had a website from the very beginning, I could have used the momentum I had initially to build a brand while I was focused on delivering exceptional client work to plan for growth. The reason I didn’t was simply a lack of time to focus on getting a site up, but that honestly isn’t a valid excuse, especially if you run a web design agency.

Tip: Don’t be a perfectionist but also note that if you are a web designer some leads & prospects will be confused when they see your website and it might hurt your business.

Your website

As a web design agency, your goal should be to have an excellent website that impresses anyone that visits it, but that’s a long-term goal so aiming for that now isn’t going to help you land clients quickly. And what scares me most is when I see a logo before any sort of business plan, these things are nice to have, but what you need is a simple (but still impressive) website that is good enough for you to use to promote your business, capture leads and let people learn more about you.

So to begin with you’d simply have pages to fulfill the three purposes above:

1. Home
2. About
3. Contact

Services pages are overrated and you don’t need one when just starting out because you won’t know exactly which services you want to provide so the last thing you want to do is alienate someone by making them think you can’t do something because it isn’t listed on your services page.

Once you land some clients and deliver great work, a portfolio is a great way to build trust with leads and make the sales process 10x easier and faster.

Your social profiles

Again, this is something you don’t want to spend a lot of time on and should only carve out about 30 minutes to an hour of a day. – at the start. Once you have a client-base, building these platforms will become a more significant yet extremely valuable time investment.

Set up the basic social profiles so that leads which do some due diligence will know that you exist and are in fact a real business. In 2020, I’d recommend focusing on Facebook & LinkedIn. Facebook is still a big network for businesses and so is LinkedIn. In addition to Facebook & LinkedIn, using Twitter to engage with people in the industry and build a personal brand is a great use of your time as it will allow you to establish yourself as an authority – again a great way to shorten the sales cycle and build trust with clients.

Process & Work Quality

If you’re just starting out, then no matter what, there will be a level of scrambling to figure out how to do things. So while there’s nothing you can do to eliminate this entirely, it’s important that you minimize it wherever you can.

I’ve heard a lot of stories from clients about working with web developers and designers.

Some are as crazy as people just disappearing without notice when a project hasn’t been finished. For clients that have paid an unfinished site is an obvious problem but even for clients that haven’t paid, you don’t want to leave them hanging. They’ve already invested their time to get you what you need to start working on the project so if you don’t complete it, they’re going to have to start that all over again which is a great way to leave a seriously bad impression.

When looking for clients, this is often going to be the primary roadblock. If you haven’t yet demonstrated your ability & authority in the industry, it’s going to be difficult to find a client that will actually trust and want to work with you.

A solid process ensures that you and/or your team complete every detail that is required to finish a job properly. Missing things, even the small stuff, leaves a feeling of a half-finished job and will ensure you never get referrals.

Whether you’re doing your first design project or run a 10-person agency, your primary objective for growth should be to impress every client by doing an exceptional job every single time.

There are two parts to this. One is the finished product. This is a given. It inevitably has to be good for them to be adequately satisfied. The second is your process, which is where you can really start to impress them, earn repeat business, and justify referrals.

The reason this is so important is that the barrier to entry to starting a web design business is so low thanks to tools like Elementor and Beaver Builder that make it relatively simple. Anyone and everyone can throw a site together with WordPress. Not everyone can design and develop a site that helps businesses & be enjoyable to work with.

So how can you make your process stand out?

We’re obviously biased, but an incredible number of agencies are freelancers are using Atarim to impress clients and simplify their web design client feedback & communication workflow. Start your no-risk, free 7-day trial today.

And while we’re on the topic of process & work quality, it’s also important that you never stop learning about WordPress so you can stay ahead of the curve.

With all that out of the way, let’s jump into getting leads.

2. Referrals

Impress (go above and beyond)

As mentioned above, this one really goes without saying, but a surprising number of businesses struggle to do this.

With referrals, more than with any other strategy, you need to actually earn them. Get the project done on time, take time to understand their business & use software like Atarim to impress them with your process.

Collect feedback and improve

Both during and even once you’ve finished a project, you should show that you care about their experience. Do this by communicating with them, schedule a hand-off call with all clients where they can bring up any potential issues, thank you and give you some feedback.

Surveys are great and all. But, they’re impersonal. The only way you’ll actually get the whole truth about how people felt about their experience and your process is if you take the time to get on the phone with them and hear them out.

As you do this, over time you will be able to identify significant issues with your process and mitigate them so that you come closer to earning referrals.

Pro Tip: Ask if you can record your offboarding/review calls so that you can review negative feedback. And, if you get great feedback, ask them for written consent to use snippets of the call in your marketing material & transcribe a snippet of it that you can use a written testimonial as well.

Actually Ask For Referrals

Last but not least, improving your process is great and all, but what do you do when they tell you how great you are on your hand-off call? You follow-up with a thank you email and let them know that referrals would be appreciated.

Pro Tip: If a client does refer you to someone they know and it wouldn’t be pushing it, ask them to make the email introduction. This will carry far more weight than if you just reach out to them and say that John Doe said they were looking for someone do redesign their website.

3. Outreach

Cold emails have a terrible reputation, am I right?

We all know that the odds of you emailing the founder of a million-dollar company, let alone any company and getting a response are almost 0.

As someone who, despite being relatively new to the industry has managed to get conversations going with prolific people time and time again, I’m going to go through the tips and tricks you need to succeed. Jokes aside, there are no tips, tricks, or gimmicks anywhere in this post.

What we will do, however, is break down how I’ve gone from getting little to no replies (likely your current state) to getting replies from people I (you) look up to consistently. This isn’t something that you can copy & paste and replace in five minutes with some repetitive template. If that’s the amount of effort you’re willing to put into your business, then you might have a bigger problem than just finding clients. ?

The Anatomy Of A Great Outreach Email

Every cold email needs three fundamental components to even have a chance of being successful:

• A relational anchor
• A win for them
• A clear ask

The Relational Anchor

The relational anchor is your connection to the person you’re emailing so you don’t come off as just some random person who stumbled across their website a few minutes ago and just wants something from them. In some cases, the relational anchor can be something as simple as being a member of their audience or email list subscriber.

Win For Them

When you’re just starting out, it’s going to be difficult to find people where you really have something of incredible value to offer them. You likely don’t already have a huge audience and can’t really offer much in return.

Rest assured, everyone running an online business is always focusing on one thing. Providing value to their audience.

Your initial email needs to demonstrate that you recognize something that you can do for their audience and have actual expertise to be able to speak on that topic without coming off as some complete stranger.

A Clear Ask

Let’s face it, I used to make this mistake as well. Emailing a stranger when the purpose of the email is unclear and just includes asking them how things are going comes off as ingenuine because they know there’s going to be an ask at some point anyway. Plus, the type of people you’re emailing get hundreds if not thousands of emails per day so you need to do something to stand out.

How does that sound? or Would you be interested in collaborating together? is not a clear ask that gives someone enough information to even justify a response which is why emails I receive like this remain unanswered.

A clear ask would be Are you interested in having me teach your audience about the intersection of design & SEO? because that demonstrates the value to them and they know what would be expected of them. Using some generic term like “partnership” or “collaboration” is so open-ended, it could involve literally anything.

Sidenote: The easier it is to respond to your pitch, the more responses you’ll get. Sounds obvious when I put it that way, right? ?

4. Partnerships

Now that we’ve covered email outreach, you’ll be glad to hear that the skill is transferrable. Outreach is useful in a number of ways, the first is (as we covered above) to actually land clients.

The second, which is equally important & and works hand-in-hand, involves partnerships. Connect with and build a relationship with other businesses that already successfully serve your target market in a different way.

These need to be non-competing (obviously), so, for web design agencies, this can include SEO & marketing agencies. As in this case, a referral would be extremely natural as it’s very common for us to have clients that require a website redesign. This is just one example of a parallel industry, there are tons of others.

Some people offer a percentage for partner referrals, though in my experience once you develop a good relationship with each other (as long as it is somewhat mutually exclusive), the commission doesn’t matter. Most are more than happy to refer people my way because they know that the people will be grateful and thank them/trust them more in return – all in all, it really is a win-win situation.

Finding Partners

Assessing and evaluating whether potential partners would be a good fit needs to be done on a case-by-case basis, but let’s start with some sources to find the potential partners to begin with.

The closest of existing connections can include sources, such as:

• Friends and families who have businesses
• Blogs or email lists that you yourself have subscribed to
• Podcasts that you listen to
• Courses of other products you’ve purchased
• Services that you use
• People you’ve interacted with in communities

Other questions you should ask yourself to help kickstart the process of finding potential partners include:

• Who already works with or serves my ideal clients?
• What can I offer them?
• Where do they spend their time?
• Where do my ideal customers spend their time?

Connecting with and meeting with partners works in much the same way as networking and email outreach which was covered in the previous section.

5. Communities & Networking

A lot of people do networking wrong.

Going to these events has nothing to do with handing out as many business cards as possible. That’s the first thing people tend to get wrong.

The second most common mistake is people attend the wrong events altogether. Simply because they have no process or method to choose which events to attend. Most people attend events that are purely a pool of competitors. There is still inherent value in such events because you can learn what others are doing well and get answers to questions from people who’ve been where you are at some point, but you’re not really helping your business by attending events like those.

Put it this way. As an SEO & marketing agency owner, it doesn’t make much sense for me to attend BrightonSEO to find clients. It’s definitely still a great experience and I recommend going to events like this because you can network with like-minded people in the industry which is obviously useful.

However, there is much more logic in attending the WordPress Meetup in London because this is an industry in which I have a number of clients. It’s where my clients’ customers are and it’s where the decision-makers at potential clients companies are…

Meetups

A great place to start if you’re looking for events to attend is searching through the events in the business category on Meetup.com. Try to find one which occurs on a consistent schedule as those are the ones where the organizers really know what they’re doing…

Chamber of Commerce

While I haven’t, others have also had great success by attending the local chamber of commerce events. As with Meetups, you’ll very quickly know which are worth attending again and which aren’t worth going back to.

Facebook Groups

Especially during COVID-19, in-person events are out of the question. But even when there isn’t a global pandemic affecting businesses, Facebook groups are a great place to hang out with people in your industry as well as potential customers.

Your Turn – Go Find Clients

The strategies and processes outlined in this post have proven time and time again to be an effective way to grow beyond six figures. There are no secrets and nobody can do it for you. Just focus on delivering great work, building your network, and earning referrals.

Last but not least, double-down on what works. Once one channel or strategy starts working, don’t stop doing it altogether. Make the most of it and slowly diversify so that your efforts eventually snowball…

What has been the single most effective strategy for your business?

Let me know in the comments below so we can keep this post up-to-date with everyone’s collective experience. ?

Managing client expectations is by far one of the most difficult parts of running an agency. It can be really difficult to find a balance between working as hard as you can to exceed clients’ expectations and setting unreasonable expectations in the long-term.

So, whether you run a big agency or operate as a small team, in this post, we’ll be covering 7 key rules to managing client expectations.

Why Does Managing Client Expectations Matter?

Keeping a pulse on and managing client expectations is an essential part of client communication. But when does the process actually start?

• Is it after the client has already been onboarded?
• Is it on your first call with them?
• Or is it only once you’ve started working together?

The truth is that it’s all of the above and actually starts long before that as well.

All of the content you share about running a business and what it is that you do defines you. The way you choose to represent yourself is what clients will come to expect, so this is a choice you have to make. And so this

In this post, we’re going to lay out some ground rules. But remember, rules are meant to be broken. This isn’t supposed to be a stupid quote, what I mean when by “rules are meant to be broken” is that you hopefully will and definitely should put everything here to the test, so that you actually understand the logic and don’t just blindly follow what some “gurus” in the industry tell you too, which is something I think we can agree we see far too often.

Managing client expectations is one of the easy to overlook parts of running an agency that actually matters.

It is without a doubt one of the most important parts of running a business that involves working with clients on a daily basis. I wholeheartedly believe that this is what has allowed me to retain clients for years and not have to constantly work to replace lost revenue.

Sure, you can work hard to make money consistently – or you can work both smart and hard – and, in my opinion, that’s the happy medium. The one where you really get to enjoy agency life, satisfy (or even impress) clients and build a business you love.

All in all, you want clients to enjoy working with you, so much so, that they’re going to refer you to other businesses, stay with you for months – if not years – on end, pay invoices on time and maybe even offer to pay more (yes, this has really happened).

I’m sure you get the idea by now, so let’s dive into the 7 key principles of managing client expectations…

1. Once you set an expectation you can’t break it

If you reply to a text at 1 AM because you’re still up for some reason, or you get work done over the weekend, this becomes an expectation.

It becomes a given. Not something that clients will feel indebted to you for, or forever be grateful for. I really wish this were the case but sadly, it just isn’t.

The logic behind this is the idea behind why the key to being great is simply being good, but consistently. You should strive for service to be consistent, not exceptional one week and then ok the next. Unrealistically or failing to manage expectations sets the tone of incoherence & unreliability in your process.

2. Set clear deliverables

Even when clients claim that they don’t care about the specifics surrounding how you plan on achieving the solution they’re looking for, you still need to detail a plan of action with timelines.

This is extremely important to keep your team on track internally as well as ensuring they don’t suddenly change dates or start expecting additional work that wasn’t a part of the original scope.

3. Always have legal documentation (contracts)

I am by no means a lawyer or certified professional to comment on this matter, but the one thing I can say is that having legal documentation, such as contracts or at the very least signed proposals is extremely important.

Especially if you manage or have access to the customer data on clients’ sites that are on care plans – in a post-GDPR world, you should seriously consider having all clients sign a GDPR data processing agreement since you act as a data processor in this scenario.

In an ideal world, none of this documentation would be necessary, but with what’s at stake, hoping for the best just isn’t good enough.

You never know when you’ll lose a client and they’ll suddenly turn from being your favorite client into having reason to believe that something you did result in customer information being exposed, which is why you need to take the necessary to indemnify yourself where possible.

4. Enforce systems that centralize client communication at all costs

If you run a WordPress design or development agency, while we are a bit biased, thousands of agencies will agree that using a system like Atarim is the best way to streamline & scale client communication.

Having systems that centralize communication and let you collect client requests from all of the websites you’re working on or managing on a care plan is essential if you want to be able to operate at any scale.

5. Communicate more than you need to but less than you want to

Take the time to understand and get to know them and their business because this is something that not a lot of people actually do.

You need to actually care about your clients’ businesses. Not doing so makes you a commodity. It makes you easily replaceable and doesn’t set you apart.

Because let’s face it.

If you run a WordPress design or development agency, there are 10s of thousands of freelancers that are cheaper and could potentially do a great job with your client as well.

If you run an SEO agency, there are thousands out there that can build links and write (not so great) content for your clients.

And if you’re a copywriter, well heck, it feels like there are 100s of thousands out there soliciting their services to me alone.

So what is is that sets you apart and makes you and invaluable, irreplaceable resource clients?

Spending time to understand a client’s business and really hitting it off with them and their team is essential if you want to retain clients.

In addition to this, being upfront and anticipating potential issues is extremely important. You should always and consistently keep your point of contact updated. Everyone has to be on the same page.

If you communicate everything with your client effectively, not only will they know where the project stands, but problems can be dealt with as soon as they arise preventing them from escalating into anything further. If there’s something the client isn’t happy with, that’s something you want to know as soon as possible so that it’s something you can rectify as soon as possible.

Set a time, perhaps at the end of each week, that you’ll speak to the client. It lets you develop your relationship and pick up issues as soon as they arise; no nasty surprises for you or for them!

6. Be your own customer

You really don’t need to read your clients’ minds.

Clients will only tell you what they expect but won’t ever be capable of fully communicating what they are thinking to you. This is why it’s essential to put yourself into their shoes.

What would a client expect from you? What do they need?

Not only will this help you better manage their expectations, but it allows you to serve them from end-to-end. If you’ve been in the industry for a while, it’s safe to say that you actually know more about what it is that their business needs (in terms of design, marketing or SEO – whatever it is that you do), than they do, so use this to your advantage.

7. Be honest, authentic and tell the truth

Being completely transparent and upfront from the beginning is not only the key to managing client expectations, but it’s also essential to fostering a good relationship with clients.

Remember that most clients don’t actually know the specifics of your creative or technical process which makes this the perfect chance to be clear about what you can and cannot do. For example, redesigning a website isn’t going to make your client rank #1 on Google. Doing so would actually be overpromising – which is a terrible idea in general – and being transparent on matters like these will indicate to your client that you know what you’re doing.

A great example of this specific to the work that I do at ScaleMath – applicable to marketing agencies – is when prospects or current clients ask me about results. Conveniently, all of my proposals have a selection of case studies and already briefly touch on the topic of results, and projections that we can and cannot make. As an SEO & marketing agency, you have to be careful not to overpromise because deliverables and results are not as clear-cut as they are with other types of agencies, such as web design agencies.

However, in both cases, it is important to clarify the scope of the project. Make sure that the client is aware that even a projected deadline for the project or any partial milestone is subject to change based on their ability to respond and provide feedback on revisions.

On average, agencies using Atarim managed to cut their project completion time down by an incredible 2 weeks. So if collecting feedback on website revisions and design changes is something that eats up your internal resources and consumes far too much time, give Atarim a try today.

Use every suitable communication touch-point to restate that thee are some things you simply can’t guarantee. This will help them understand your creative or technical process, have more realistic expectations going forward and make it easy for them to trust and rely on you in the long-term.

8. Ensure the client is aware of their responsibilities

This goes hand in hand with managing expectations, but it’s worth reiterating that you have to ensure the client is aware of what is and what isn’t their responsibility.

• Will you be writing all of the copy for their site as well?
• At what stage of the design process will you need their feedback and approval to move forward?
• What images will they need to provide you with?

Ensure that both you and the client have the answers to the above questions and are on the same page when it comes to anything else that could potentially hold a project back from being approved.

Summary – Setting & Managing Client Expectations

Nobody wants their clients’ experience to feel incoherent and unstructured, and with this guide to setting & managing client expectations, you’ll be far from it.

This post covers a number of prerequisites and things you should discuss with each of your clients before and during projects with them. If you want to make collecting website feedback from clients even easier and less stressful, give Atarim a try today.

Have any other questions about setting & managing client expectations or want to join the conversation? Leave a comment below.

The situation that we’re dealing with globally at the moment is probably one of, if not the worst, some of us have experienced in our lifetime.

If there’s one thing that we want to emphasize in this post it’s that it’s ok to admit that this is a difficult time knowing that we will also get through it.

We will survive and, if we take the right steps, can come out stronger on the other side.

Before we get into this post, I want to acknowledge that we’re all being affected by COVID-19 in different ways, the last thing we want is for this post to be taken out of context. Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone affected, especially those who are in quarantine and have lost loved ones. Needless to say, stay safe & healthy everyone – wash your hands and self-isolate at home, don’t leave unless you really need to, and above all, be smart and don’t lose hope.

1. Remote-Only Work

Everyone at Atarim is working from home.

This is part of the recommend social distancing that should be taking place across the world right now. It’s a shame to see that people still needlessly leave the house and a number of companies still require their employees to come into their offices even when not necessary.

Keep getting reports of companies refusing employees the right to work from home during this pandemic. It's absolutely atrocious, and I can't sit quiet on them. So email your story to corona-reports@hey.com and include Rabid49 in the subject. I will update https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FsOdMwSjEgS

— DHH (@dhh) March 16, 2020

Try to encourage the same remote-only work policy in your companies and trust your employees to carry on doing great work from home.

It is still more than possible to do great work as long as you properly communicate with your clients…

2. Communicate More & Better Than Ever

Social distancing is difficult. A lot of us who already work remotely had little to no contact with the outside world on most days, which is why we encourage you to connect with your team even more during this difficult time.

Make sure you’re sharing everything that’s going on so that your employer or employees can understand the situation you’re in. Don’t be hard on them if they are slightly slower to complete tasks and deliver work on time, but – if you run a WordPress design or development agency now is the time to work on your communication. Now, more than ever is the time to improve your communication workflow and fix your client communication problem.

3. Support Your Customers

During this time, it’s also important that you understand your customers’ situation. COVID-19 was not only officially classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization but it is also understandably having a huge impact on the global economy.

The hospitality industry had its worst year yet and in some places is completely falling apart with businesses on the verge of shutting down as a result of it. Even as digital agencies, we need to acknowledge that this is the case for our customers and try to do our best to help them come out on the other side.

Whether that’s updating their website with information frequently regarding opening times, modified services – now is not the time to leave them on their own. So now that you have some more time on your hands while you’re at home, consider upgrading to Atarim and implement a proper client communication system that scales.

We’re here to help everyone during this time as well and want to help people use our software to continue to do great work even during times exactly like these when it feels like everything is falling apart, your communication & workflow really shouldn’t.

To do so, we’ll be increasing the number of sites you can use Atarim on, to anyone who wants and/or needs it – in addition to extending free trials to an entire month rather than a week.

That being said, we can only do so much and if your business is suffering and mental health has been affected as a result we highly recommend turning to WP&UP which will be happy to help you as well…

4. Communicate With Your Agency’s Clients During This Time (Template)

A lot of your clients will have nobody to turn to, so supporting them properly during this time is something that is not going to be easily forgotten or overlooked.

Here’s a template you can use as inspiration to re-connect with clients during this time:

Hi NAME,

First and foremost, we hope that you and your family are staying safe and healthy during this troubling time.

The Coronavirus pandemic has obviously caused a lot of disruption to our everyday lives, which will start to spill over into our businesses as well.

That said, I’m reaching out to let you know that there has not been, nor do we anticipate there being, any disruption to our service.

Fortunately, all of our employees have the ability to work remotely and we will continue to operate business as usual, barring unforeseen change to circumstances.

We know that taking the right precautionary measures to stay safe is the best thing we can do right now and we’re also cognizant of how crucial it is in a time like this to mitigate as much negative impact on business as possible within our control.

We’re committed to making sure that our clients are in the best possible position, from a marketing perspective, on the other side of this and see exponential growth when life inevitably returns to normal.

We’re closing watching the market and monitoring any potential roadblocks. If anything comes up, we will be in communication immediately. It sounds cliche, but we’re all in this situation together – you can lean on us during these troubling times if needed.

Our door is open and we welcome any discussion regarding what’s going on, how it’s affecting your business (it’s affecting all of us in some fashion), and more importantly how we can respond with solutions.

Obviously, please don’t just copy & paste the template, we recommend modifying it to suit the services that you provide as well as how you typically tend to communicate with your clients…

Wrapping Up – We All Need Community

Last but not least, now more than ever we need community. Many of us are in self-isolation and effectively practicing social distancing – as we should – but for those of you that have never worked remotely, this can be difficult.

Coronavirus Discounts, Deals, and Offers

Struggling to stay indoors? No problem.

Here are some time-sensitive offers, discounts, and deals that companies have put in place in light of the global pandemic. We’ve personally been finding it very easy to stay indoors as a result and hope that it will encourage you to do the same…

1. Ahrefs Blogging for Business (Free, Instead of $799)

Ahrefs which is one of the SEO tools that I avidly use personally have not only discounted their “Blogging for Business” course from the original price of $799, they have temporarily made it completely free.

Learn more about the Ahrefs Blogging for Business Course…

2. Adobe Creative Cloud (2 Months Free)

Adobe has extended their trial to a two month period to help creative professionals use this time wisely to learn, and potentially master their software so that they can continue to thrive during the difficult economic period that we are facing.

Sign Up for Adobe Creative Cloud (2 Months Free)…

3. Affinity – Professional Creative Software

Affinity is also stepping in to support the creative community during COVID-19, with:

• A new 90-day free trial of the Mac and Windows versions of the whole Affinity suite
• A 50% discount for those who would rather buy and keep the apps on Mac, Windows PC, and iPad
• A pledge to engage more than 100 freelance creatives for work, spending the equivalent of our annual commissioning budget in the next three months (more details of this will be announced soon).

Learn more about how Affinity is supporting the creative community…

4. Loom

Loom is another piece of software that I use avidly when explaining concepts to both clients as well as people that I work with. It makes it extremely easy to record and share quick, impromptu screen recordings to walk people through something on your computer.

Due to the surge in people that are now somewhat involuntarily having to join the working from home/remote work movement, Loom has responded to the global crisis since their software is something that makes remote work a lot easier:

• They have removed the recording limit on their free plan entirely.
• They have cut the price of the Pro plan in half (now only $5/month).
• They have extended all trials from 14 to 30 days.

Learn more & sign up to Loom…

5. Microsoft Teams

Similar to Loom, Microsoft has decided to help support companies given the surge in the number of people working from home. Microsoft Teams, similar to Slack and TeamWork Chat is stepping in to offer 6 months free.

They are also offering their service to NHS and first-responders at no cost at all.

Sign Up For Microsoft Teams With 6-Months Free…

6. SiteGround Hosting

SiteGround, an extremely well-respected hosting company in the industry is helping out website owners all over the world during the COVID-19 pandemic by offering 12 months of free shared hosting to those who need it. This offer is only available until the 31st of March…

With the outbreak of #COVID19, being kind & supportive has become more important than ever. Tell us by March 31 what you do to help friends, clients, community & we will give away 12 months of free shared hosting to the most inspiring good causes. Use #StaySafeBeKind hashtag! pic.twitter.com/ZMjM8lq8q1

— SiteGround (@SiteGround) March 18, 2020

Next up, for those of you who want to use this time to learn and acquire new skills – here are some courses that typically cost money but are now completely free:

7. WP Elevation Digital Agency Blueprint (50% off)

There has never been a better time to double-down on growing your digital agency than now, especially with 50% off of WP Elevation’s Digital Agency Blueprint which ends on March 30th.

8. Zapier Mastery by James Rose (50% off)

Who doesn’t want more time? With Jimmy Rose’s Zapier Mastery course, you’ll learn exactly how you can automate time-consuming, tedious parts of running your business so you can spend time on things that really matter.

Deal: 50% off with code SCREWCOVID

Grab the Zapier Mastery course today while it’s 50% off…

9. Mor Cohen’s DesignClass Course (30% off)

DesignClass course is a design-focused course specifically made for digital marketers, web developers and business owners to mater design and charge more for your products or services.

Deal: 30% off with code skills30 at checkout.

Grab the DesignClass course today…

10. Craig Campbell’s Advanced SEO Course Free)

Craig Campbell is a well-respected SEO in the community and the host of his very own SEO podcast which I personally recommend listening into. While I haven’t personally taken his course, it’s not just on sale right now, it’s completely free so you literally have nothing to lose and if it’s anything like the rest of his work, I’m sure you’ll love it…

11. Digital Marketer Lab Access (Free)

Prior to them offering all of their courses, I had not personally heard of Digital Marketer nor have I taken any of their courses, but I did sign up and take a look around. Since access to what they call the “lab” is now free, you’ll see a number of courses available inside that are free to take.

Learn more about Digital Marketer’s Lab…

12. My Traffic Research (Free)

My Traffic Research is also offering their course for free. Full disclosure, I also have not taken this course and hadn’t heard of it prior to their 100% discount, but I did take a brief look on the inside and there are a number of videos about avoiding and dealing with Google penalties and ranking your sites safely. As with the others, it’s free so there’s really nothing to lose – be sure to let us know what you think!

Learn more about My Traffic Research…