Many of the best website designers I know are one man shops. They get into website design because of their artistic capabilities, often coming from graphic design backgrounds. They first build a website for a friend or two and then the word gets out. Soon, they have their own website design business up and running. This works VERY well at a VERY small scale. But what do you do when your one man shop can no longer keep up with the demand? How do you grow your business (and profits)?
The skills required to be a great web designer are very different from scaling a business. Here are 5 solid reasons why you should consider a website reseller to scale your business past your first 10 clients.
1) You are not a one-man army
Scale is the biggest reason you will want to use a website builder reseller team. You are reading this blog post precisely because you are having trouble keeping up. Deadlines are slipping, customers are inpatient, perhaps you've even been fired from a gig. That never used to happen. But at your current scale, you need backup. An outsourced web design team may just be the answer.
2) Training staff is amazingly hard
Many businesses first try to grow this capability in-house. But if you've done any recruitment, selection and training before, you know that this is not trivial. When you work with a website reseller, they have those processes perfected. They are already operating at scale. This is a great advantage to you because the time constraints involved in building your own in-house web design team are significant. Don't forget, people also leave jobs.
3) Profits are higher with a website builder reseller
Yes, you will make more money using a website reseller than trying to grow your design team internally. Why? The reselling organization has economy of scale on their side because they outsource web design every day. They have processes, forms, QA, etc. In short, they are a web design assembly line. This means efficiency, which in turn means they can give you a lower price than you would ever be able to achieve yourself.
4) Website resellers have high customer satisfaction
For the same reasons mentioned above, you will find that your deadlines are hit more consistently and requirements are managed more tightly using an outsourced website design approach. Yes, this will take some getting used to. The outsourced web design team will push you to document requirements like never before. But guess what, that will also help customer satisfaction and retention. It does not remove creativity from the process, it merely ensures that creativity does not continue forever - eating into your profits. This structure is well documented as a recipe for high profits and higher customer satisfaction.
5) You got into web design for the love of graphics, not business
Using a website reseller to deliver your work will allow you to pick and choice which websites you still want to design personally. You can develop pricing tiers so that the cheapest websites are shipped off to your website reseller for fulfillment while the more expensive gigs remain on your desk. This arrangement works very well because you will spend time where the profits are highest.