Metafluence

Business development tips for web designers and programmers

I owned my own web development business for five years. During that time I learned quite a bit about how to develop new business. Since then I’ve been working at a larger, more successful company and I’ve been refining my business development knowledge from there. I remember when I was starting out wondering how other people found new clients or got in with clients that had ongoing needs. This article attempts to share a few tidbits on just such knowledge.

Small projects with low budgets are not as profitable. I don’t just mean that they are less money, I mean that the time it takes to ramp up to the point of doing work is not much less than a large project. It takes a number of hours to get to know each other, discuss the project needs, develop a proposal, and enter them into your system. With large projects this upfront investment is a much smaller fraction of the total cost because the getting to know each other phase takes about the same amount of time. This isn’t to say that small projects are bad. In fact, they can be a lot of fun and quite profitable if the client has a clear sense of what they want and are confident in you abilities enough to not require too much time sniffing each other out. Sometimes the most personally rewarding and fun projects have little to no money, such as working with a band or non-profit. It is good to have cool work in your portfolio to impress the clients that do have money.

Large projects can be quite profitable, but they have their own challenge: management. I have a draft post about project management for web development that is turning into several posts, but here’s a couple of quick insights. Managing large projects requires good process. You’ll need to have that process at least partially in place with a good idea about how to finish it before taking on a large project. Large web development projects require information architecture, detailed schedules, content checklists, and more. If you don’t know what large projects require, stay tuned as I’ll be releasing some great information that should help. In the mean time, here’s some more information about working with small projects.

Be smart about people who don’t tell you what their budget is. Quality businesses have budgets. Every month they look at a profit and loss statement and compare it to their yearly budget in order to make management decisions. If they are not hitting their targets, they need to know so they can take evasive action. If they are exceeding their targets, they need to know so they can scale up or slow down sales. If they’re on target, then they proceed as planned. When a web developer is just starting out, it often means working for businesses that don’t practice this kind of business discipline. That means that they don’t have a budget for web development and likely have an unclear picture of where they stand financially as a business. If they are thinking they need a website and don’t have a budget, they view the whole project as an expense. More importantly that means they want as much as possible for as little as possible.

If you are a small operation just starting out or still developing your reputation, the no budget client is likely all that is available to you. Businesses that have their shit together are looking to work with more established web developers because they don’t understand the Internet industry well enough to do it for themselves, so to mitigate the risk, they look to other factors like: who’s on your client list, how big is your company, what kind of results has your work produced before, etc. It can feel unfair, especially if you are talented beyond your current reputation can prove.

When I was managing my web development firm, I was always on the lookout for new business. Finding new business is quite challenging. I was constantly adding new contacts to my address book. Then once I found a client, it would often take six months to a year to finally engage in a paying project. And because bills continue to show up every month, my business seemed to have an insatiable desire for new projects.

After a couple of years of hustling, I figured out that my economic base had to be built on long term clients. I couldn’t charge developing clients for the time we spent discussing their needs and what I could do for them. It wasn’t like I was spending a great deal of hours spinning wheels, it’s just that people tend to take a while to part with their money. Understandable. Buying a website has to be quite scary for clients given the general education level of business about the Internet.

One tip I can tell you for developing a good source of business is to become an approved vendor with a large business. Businesses like Microsoft and Adidas have large agencies that take care of their big picture advertising and branding. However, these companies are so huge that they have hundreds of divisions that have their own web development needs and they are responsible for finding their own service providers. These divisions are mostly too busy to find service providers on their own, so they mostly rely on an internal company directory of pre-approved vendors. If you get on that list, then you will get a ton of calls for new projects. So how do you get on that list? It’s something called a master service agreement. If you jump through the hoops for securing a master service agreement, then you’ll be on that list. Getting an MSA is a bit of a trick if you’re small and/or lesser known. My recommendation is to look at it as an investment. Start by helping someone in a large business for cheap. Then totally make them happy. Once they think you are their savior, then ask them if they could help you secure an MSA application because you really enjoyed working with them. Once you’re in, then when the next person from the company calls who you don’t know up your rates again to your normal wage. Not sure about how to get in with someone in a large business? Attend a few chamber of commerce events or other local business networking events and you’ll find someone. Geek out with them a bit and be super helpful. Be eager to help them. You can even be honest and let them know you’re interested in helping them because you’re looking to build your portfolio with larger name businesses. Professionals respect that.

Hopefully some of these tips were helpful. If you did find them useful, then you might be interested in a really huge post I wrote a while back about how to establish agreements and write proposals. it is full of very specific information that will aid you in proposal writing and even offers specific things to say to clients during the agreement establishment conversation. Good luck out there!

Did you find any of these tips useful? Do you have any tips of your own? Have any questions related to these tips? Drop a brother a comment.