Everyone I'm offering clients already has clients. Should I just endure?

[Fox]

One more overall comment here:

Cold emailing tactics (or any tactics) can't fight against bad overall strategy.

There are no magic words to overcome a bad market / unneeded solution / massive lack of trust.

Growing a web design business is a game of matching a strategy with the level you are at:
No results = stick to people VERY likely to be willing to give you a chance.
Some results = start more direct cold outreach (but be smart)
Great results = start building marketing and lead systems

Along with this - put the odds in your favour:
- A niche that isn't saturated with offers
- A location and country open to online help
- People who are likely and willing to pay well for help

And, work on your craft:
- Keep learning sales, marketing, conversion, business operations
- Take action, look at what happened, adjust and improve
- Be very honest with yourself on why things are not working out

The focus on doing this should be to learn how to learn. This way you can take your lessons and move on to do something a lot bigger. If you are just "Ill do this a 1,000 times"... how are you going to make any business work?

For example, you don't become a successful comedian by just learning someone elses jokes. You look at timing, expression, the concept behind the joke and so on. Same with business - don't just keep smashing the same technique... look at the big picture and learn how to improve and get better.

I hope this helps anyone stuck doing the same thing and not seeing how to progress.

It likely isn't *it*, it is the approach behind it.

 

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[Black_Dragon43]

Sure it’s unethical but probably like 75% of companies have fake reviews and testimonies. I was just throwing it out there.

Why would you use fake reviews? :S

People can tell when the reviews are fake. It’s very easy — there are no videos, pictures look like AI or stock photos, and there are few details provided about who the people are.

Why not tell the truth?

“Would you like a website for your business? Here’s the deal, I’m new to this, so I’ll help you for free, with 1 condition. Is there anyone in your network you can introduce me to after the website is designed who would be willing to pay me $X for a website and also needs one?”

Then you get a portfolio item, testimonial and introduction to another business owner.

Beats waiting 6 months with fake reviews to get a client.

Also, imo, most web designers should find a higher value activity. Web design is so 2000s. It’s very hard to justify value to businesses, unless you really do have special skills (for example, buidling 3D websites).

You should much rather sell business growth, which can include a website but most importantly some sort of marketing service. Imagine I’m a plumber that makes 7-figures. I want to grow. I might have a crappy website. And you ask me for $10,000 to make me a website based off some shitty template that anyone can get. Why wouldn’t I just head over to Upwork and get a hardcore Ukrainian dev with tons of experience to build me a website for $1,000? I would, provided I knew how to do that. Now, if I am happy to hire someone without ever meeting them, presumably I already know of Upwork in this day and age, don’t I?

 

[Antifragile]

Why not tell the truth?

Why not just do?

Find a perfect client. Don’t offer then anything. Take their website and re-design it as part of your future portfolio. Use it sharpen your skills!

Step 2: Gift it to the owner and say “if you love it, you decide what you want to pay me. But if you use it, I’ll be showing it as part of my portfolio”.

You want to live like the top 1% - act like it. Do hard things. Cold emailing and calling isn’t hard. It’s the “easy button” of no results.


But most people don’t want to do that. Why? It’s easier to get romantic about some great first client who’ll be your “Netflix subscription model” …

 

[Kak]

There’s a lesson here.

An electrician or contracting company is fastlane.

Figuring out how to scale with the labor bottleneck… could be VERY fastlane.

It was discovered right here in front of everyone, but went totally unconsidered.

 

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[Antifragile]

There’s a lesson here.

An electrician or contracting company is fastlane.

Figuring out how to scale with the labor bottleneck… could be VERY fastlane.

It was discovered right here in front of everyone, but went totally unconsidered.

​

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.​

 

[MRiabov]

There’s a lesson here.

An electrician or contracting company is fastlane.

Figuring out how to scale with the labor bottleneck… could be VERY fastlane.

It was discovered right here in front of everyone, but went totally unconsidered.

And it is a thing indeed. I've seen contracting companies with something like thousands of reviews and armies of electrians in regions like Dallas, TX, and they seem to make a darn good living.

If anyone is up to solve it (maybe me too somehow?), know that the industry is highly regulated. Simply to become a worker, you need to have an appreticeship for 4 years. There are regulations for everything.

So to create Fastlane you'll need to create standard procedures which push those regulations to a limit.

 

[Jrjohnny]

So I haven’t been on recently, but you guys may have heard about @CollosalRep, he’s a 16 year old from Canada and he’s been making bank.

But before this he had asked me a few questions when he wanted to run a web design agency.

I told him to do these things.

1. Go to google and search up a niche, electricians, plumbers, RE, whatever.

2. Gather up a bunch of companies from the same niche.

3. See what percentage don’t have websites.

4. Do this for a few niches

5. Pick the top 3 most website-lacking niches

6. Ask yourself which niche you can actually add value to by building them a website.

After Jack did those steps, he found out his niche, followed through with it and managed to get a ton of clients and leads but didn’t follow through with that plan.

It’s better to pick a niche that you can actually prove results with, rather than just in it because it has a big % of website-less companies.

 

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[Nostalgia]

So I haven’t been on recently, but you guys may have heard about @CollosalRep, he’s a 16 year old from Canada and he’s been making bank.

But before this he had asked me a few questions when he wanted to run a web design agency.

I told him to do these things.

1. Go to google and search up a niche, electricians, plumbers, RE, whatever.

2. Gather up a bunch of companies from the same niche.

3. See what percentage don’t have websites.

4. Do this for a few niches

5. Pick the top 3 most website-lacking niches

6. Ask yourself which niche you can actually add value to by building them a website.

After Jack did those steps, he found out his niche, followed through with it and managed to get a ton of clients and leads but didn’t follow through with that plan.

It’s better to pick a niche that you can actually prove results with, rather than just in it because it has a big % of website-less companies.

Really helpful info. I'm currently in the initial stages of my agency - building websites for people who have trust in me. But I'm going to run through this process straight away. Cheers.

Colossal told me you've been really helpful to him, so I have a lot of trust in your advice.

 

[MaxKhalus]

One more overall comment here:

Cold emailing tactics (or any tactics) can't fight against bad overall strategy.

There are no magic words to overcome a bad market / unneeded solution / massive lack of trust.

Growing a web design business is a game of matching a strategy with the level you are at:
No results = stick to people VERY likely to be willing to give you a chance.
Some results = start more direct cold outreach (but be smart)
Great results = start building marketing and lead systems

Along with this - put the odds in your favour:
- A niche that isn't saturated with offers
- A location and country open to online help
- People who are likely and willing to pay well for help

And, work on your craft:
- Keep learning sales, marketing, conversion, business operations
- Take action, look at what happened, adjust and improve
- Be very honest with yourself on why things are not working out

The focus on doing this should be to learn how to learn. This way you can take your lessons and move on to do something a lot bigger. If you are just "Ill do this a 1,000 times"... how are you going to make any business work?

For example, you don't become a successful comedian by just learning someone elses jokes. You look at timing, expression, the concept behind the joke and so on. Same with business - don't just keep smashing the same technique... look at the big picture and learn how to improve and get better.

I hope this helps anyone stuck doing the same thing and not seeing how to progress.

It likely isn't *it*, it is the approach behind it.

hey @Fox, if you already got great results but decide to market to a different group, can you still leverage those results (which are basically more conversions/traffic/bookings)...?

my space was great and now seems to have no demand since last year. Bad market AND unneeded solution. that wasn't the case when I got in.

The target is still b2b agencies/clients

 

[Fox]

hey @Fox, if you already got great results but decide to market to a different group, can you still leverage those results (which are basically more conversions/traffic/bookings)...?

my space was great and now seems to have no demand since last year. Bad market AND unneeded solution. that wasn't the case when I got in.

The target is still b2b agencies/clients

Ya just leverage the problems you have solving instead. Look at what you did for the niche - and then find a similar niche with the same problems.

 

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[RicardoGrande]

This. What?? This is so unexpected to me. Everyone told me "go high-conversion only, this is the only way"...

2 years 20 jobs? Dear god. 3000 cold calls, 400+ personalized cold emails with that little results?

@Fox how is this possible? Your methods sounded like they worked. Of course, you were going on higher firms - big housing or other really big clients.

ooh my god, will I learn a lot in this life...

Yeah, keep in mind though I work a dayjob and lost a lot of potential clients because they were unwilling to do a sales call after normal work hours or on the weekend. Couldn't take a day off to run only sales meetings because you have to call to find anyone interested first and lock down a sales meeting date/time while they're on the phone so they don't disappear. Benjamin Dennehy on youtube is a prospector by trade and talks a lot about running the numbers, why prospects vanish, cold calling, and optimal strategies to better lock prospects down.

If you've already exhausted your own network, you may need to try to hit up local networking meetups and offer to do a free project for one of the owners there. Once you get that piece of momentum, keep working it as you're working your prospecting and build your results and any other potential lead generation you can (google business profiles are important).
Running cold calls, if you have no other options like I did, is the quickest way to land clients (check tate's video in the FWS library) but you will have to iterate. I think I tested about 8 or 9 different scripts before I landed something that would get me heard. The most important thing to be wary of is that a "send me info" or "yeah check back in in a month/three months" that you will get often is NOT a guarantee of getting a job and 8/10 times they'll disappear back into the ether.
Just know what results you do provide, approach with the offer, work to get them on a call and understand their pains and if you can help them with a site.

There’s a lesson here.
An electrician or contracting company is fastlane.
Figuring out how to scale with the labor bottleneck… could be VERY fastlane.
It was discovered right here in front of everyone, but went totally unconsidered.

Had the owner of a commercial electrician company and one of a painting company voice that and told me they would hand over fistfuls of cash if I could get potential employees to them. They could "hire" people but they'd usually be under qualified or bad employees "My guy is watching god@mn tiktok instead of mixing my paints! I pay him 22$/hr!!!!". Been trying to figure out how to find qualified workers or people willing to commit to the trade and pass them onto biz owners for a few months now.

 

[MRiabov]

So I haven’t been on recently, but you guys may have heard about @CollosalRep, he’s a 16 year old from Canada and he’s been making bank.

But before this he had asked me a few questions when he wanted to run a web design agency.

I told him to do these things.

1. Go to google and search up a niche, electricians, plumbers, RE, whatever.

2. Gather up a bunch of companies from the same niche.

3. See what percentage don’t have websites.

4. Do this for a few niches

5. Pick the top 3 most website-lacking niches

6. Ask yourself which niche you can actually add value to by building them a website.

After Jack did those steps, he found out his niche, followed through with it and managed to get a ton of clients and leads but didn’t follow through with that plan.

It’s better to pick a niche that you can actually prove results with, rather than just in it because it has a big % of website-less companies.

Done
What absolutely unexpected results. The city to analyse was the city of Denver - picked on random in a map - with 778k population.

Numbers:
Plumbers: 172 companies with 24 not having a website: 17%
Electricians: 123 companies with 15 without a website: 12%
Architects: 123 companies with 8 without a website.
Real Estate: 106 companies and only 3 without a website 2.5%
Cleaning: ~108 companies with 5 companies not having a website

Which means:
There is about as much architect companies as there is electricians
There is an electrician company per 3k of population
And it means that I start calling electricians and plumbers and stop calling architects.

Also, it's funny to consider that a company without a website is probably more willing to buy a website than a company with a website already... Who could've thought.

Everyone, take numbers. Mb it's useful for you in the future.

Note: I didn't accounts for what kind of websites. Most can be crappy, there can be Facebook pages linked or it may not exist at all already. But the trends are shown. And I've also scanned only Denver, but they should be fairly equal.

Edit: now it begs the question: How the hell can I outrank 178 pages in only denver? Do people use Google that much for what it's worth?

How can I outrank GMBs with literally 3k+ reviews?

Okay, GMB works by proximity... So I need to outrank only what's closer. I can also create business cards for the owners which will have a QR with the Google maps reviews and a CTA to "hey, thank you for purchase. Could you please leave a review here?"

I also hypothesise that when if someone wants to get more business from business cards they can get "hey, if you want, you can watch what others have said here ->" and someone can just scan the card, watch the reviews and be more likely to buy.

 

[Jrjohnny]

Good job mriabov.

Hopefully those tips help and now you know your target niche.

You should especially target ones with bad websites or just start ups.

When @CollosalRep wanted to do web design agency, he wanted to do RE market, it seems to be a popular choice.

But you saw by doing research, that a lot already have websites.

But with all these mediums like realtor, social media and more it becomes harder and more rare for people to want websites.

 

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[MRiabov]

So I haven’t been on recently, but you guys may have heard about @CollosalRep, he’s a 16 year old from Canada and he’s been making bank.

But before this he had asked me a few questions when he wanted to run a web design agency.

I told him to do these things.

1. Go to google and search up a niche, electricians, plumbers, RE, whatever.

2. Gather up a bunch of companies from the same niche.

3. See what percentage don’t have websites.

4. Do this for a few niches

5. Pick the top 3 most website-lacking niches

6. Ask yourself which niche you can actually add value to by building them a website.

After Jack did those steps, he found out his niche, followed through with it and managed to get a ton of clients and leads but didn’t follow through with that plan.

It’s better to pick a niche that you can actually prove results with, rather than just in it because it has a big % of website-less companies.

Everyone around me seems to be so ultrasuccessful... On this forum at least... @CollosalRep who made 90k being younger than when I started, @Jrjohnny, even @Johnny boy, I won't even mention the older ones... I need to focus on the process...

Yeah, keep in mind though I work a dayjob and lost a lot of potential clients because they were unwilling to do a sales call after normal work hours or on the weekend. Couldn't take a day off to run only sales meetings because you have to call to find anyone interested first and lock down a sales meeting date/time while they're on the phone so they don't disappear. Benjamin Dennehy on youtube is a prospector by trade and talks a lot about running the numbers, why prospects vanish, cold calling, and optimal strategies to better lock prospects down.

If you've already exhausted your own network, you may need to try to hit up local networking meetups and offer to do a free project for one of the owners there. Once you get that piece of momentum, keep working it as you're working your prospecting and build your results and any other potential lead generation you can (google business profiles are important).
Running cold calls, if you have no other options like I did, is the quickest way to land clients (check tate's video in the FWS library) but you will have to iterate. I think I tested about 8 or 9 different scripts before I landed something that would get me heard. The most important thing to be wary of is that a "send me info" or "yeah check back in in a month/three months" that you will get often is NOT a guarantee of getting a job and 8/10 times they'll disappear back into the ether.
Just know what results you do provide, approach with the offer, work to get them on a call and understand their pains and if you can help them with a site.


Had the owner of a commercial electrician company and one of a painting company voice that and told me they would hand over fistfuls of cash if I could get potential employees to them. They could "hire" people but they'd usually be under qualified or bad employees "My guy is watching god@mn tiktok instead of mixing my paints! I pay him 22$/hr!!!!". Been trying to figure out how to find qualified workers or people willing to commit to the trade and pass them onto biz owners for a few months now.

Check out Dean White on YouTube. He has plenty of good advice on web design business. The kind of advice you don't want to miss.

 

[Guest130641]

Everyone around me seems to be so ultrasuccessful... On this forum at least... @CollosalRep who made 90k being younger than when I started, @Jrjohnny, even @Johnny boy, I won't even mention the older ones... I need to focus on the process...

Im not ultra successful, im nowhere close, my company’s worth ~125k.

And for that 125k I’ve gone through a lot, most that hasn’t been said.

I’ve had tons of complaints, push downs and many more.

@Jrjohnny isnt successful, he has failed a few businesses at the age of 13.

Pick your head up, when I was making 2k a month I was happy, but was wondering why I can’t move more.

I have grown my business over 20,000% more in the last month.

Its a domino effect.

You’ve got this man.

 

[RicardoGrande]

Just an update, was looking at ringless VM info earlier and came across this:

FCC Finds That 'Ringless Voicemails' Are Subject to Robocalling Rules

Declaratory Ruling finds that "ringless voicemail" to wireless phones requires consumer consent because it is a "call" made using an artificial or prerecorded voice and thus is covered by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act

www.fcc.gov

FTC, Law Enforcers Nationwide Announce Enforcement Sweep to Stem the Tide of Illegal Telemarketing Calls to U.S. Consumers

The Federal Trade Commission and more than 100 federal and state law enforcement partners nationwide, including the attorneys general from all 50 states and the Distri

www.ftc.gov

For US companies or entities (even if you're a freelancer), ringless VMs are now subject to robocalling rules. Granted, it's mostly meant for consumers, but can still muddy the waters even if you're reaching out to business owners for solicitation.

 

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