How Solo Web Designers Can Earn $100K/Year (Realistic Numbers)

0:00If you're looking at recurring revenue, you can really open up yourself to supporting recurring revenue clients, thinking up more types of recurring revenue products or even increasing your value by educating yourself and growing yourself. And I understand people wanting to stay small. There's books about it. People, you know, really feel passionate about um I'm just one person team. I want to stay small. But if you're looking at recurring revenue, you can really open up yourself to supporting recurring revenue clients, thinking up more types of recurring revenue products or even increasing your value by educating yourself and growing yourself in that way by adding to your team. And it doesn't even have to be

0:34100% team. We're talking like two to three people. Okay? So, uh, capacity. So, capacity, needs, and value. Let's take a look at some potential numbers. So, let's say we're gonna not that I advocate all the time for people hiring, but it's just it it's it's a breakthrough when people do um full-time oneperson web agency. Okay. In my experience, from who I talk to and what I see, this is the potential for full-time oneperson web agency in terms of capacity, value, and needs. We're looking around 12 website projects a year, so one a month at about $5,000 and about 25 maintenance clients. This is commonly what I see. And I say $5,000

1:19because realistically when you're a oneperson web agency, there is a type of website that you can feel confident handling on your own in this time frame. So if you're charging $10,000 websites, well then maybe it's six projects a year, right? Because it's probably taking you twice as long if they have more features or it's a more, you know, you're trying to deliver a better quality product. By the way, I'm making these numbers up. So, I mean, in my experience, this is what I'm going to say is the potential. Definitely not the maximum. Okay? So, this is just the potential. For monthly recurring revenue for a oneperson web agency, I have it

1:53ranging from $60 to $100 a month. Why? Because when you're one person, you're probably going to be offering website maintenance plans bare bones. We update your website, keep it secure, backed up, scanning, because you can't quite give the level of attention for more uh attention. can't get quite up the level of attention for more attention, right? So, you're doing all these maintenance clients yourself and you're doing about one website project every month or overlapping them. Um, and so that leaves you about 60k in project revenue, about 40,000 in monthly recurring revenue. I get that number because I have seen 7030 split or 8020 split. Most people have

2:36about 70% 60 to 70% on their lower plan and about 20 to 30% whatever on their higher plan. That's the split we tend to see which gives you about $100,000 pre-tax pre-expenses US dollars. Um this is fully uh possible with a oneperson web agency. In my opinion, very realistic. If you're saying where do I get the website projects from? Honestly, the longer you're in it, the more referrals you get, going out of your house, talking to people, going to the local farmers market, going to businesses around, joining local business associations, putting it in the footer of every email, going into Facebook groups, uh answering questions, um events, local events in your area. I

3:24mean, so many ways for you to get that number. Um you just have to do it. and then 25 maintenance clients uh obviously increases. So if you had 12 website projects a year, you're probably gonna sell convert about eight or nine of those onto maintenance and then you're probably going to lose about two or so a year based on people's businesses just kind of having a down year or maybe they're going out of business or they're going in a different direction. Okay, hopefully you're adding more than you're

3:52losing. Okay. To me, these are real numbers. Fully uh maybe about two to three years into being a web agency, you could reach these these numbers. Yeah, that's about right. You have 25 maintenance clients after about two to three years of website projects. Okay, moving on. So, we have some time. Full-time two to three person web agency. So, now you've increased capacity. You've increased your capacity to handle website projects, quality of website projects, and maintenance clients because you've increased capacity. I think you can do 12 website projects a year, but this time I think you can go for higher quality clients or more complex builds because you have the

4:35support you need. Maybe you have a design person and a development person. So now you have more time on sales. Now you have more time to nurture a $10,000 lead than a $5,000 lead. you uh can now handle more clients, more maintenance clients, and so maybe you can do a lot more of bringing on people who don't uh whose website you didn't build and you can start converting more of clients whose website you didn't build. So you're not having this big ticket price up front like 5,000 doing the website, but you're bringing them on for, you know, a couple hundred bucks because you want them to be a maintenance client. So

5:08this is a really good potential for a two to three person web agency. We look at those numbers, your monthly recurring revenue can now be about$1red to$200,000 $200 a month because you're able to offer more attention in your care plans. Maybe you offer strategy sessions, maybe you offer a little bit of SEO, maybe you offer some support time with 50 maintenance clients. If you offer them, let's just say, an hour of support time every month, let's say they all cashed it in and you've got 50 clients wanting an hour of support time. That's over a 40-hour work week, right? If you have people on staff, that's going to look a

5:44lot different in terms of handling that load. So, 12 website projects a year, 10,000, 50 maintenance clients. Again, that 7030 split of most people are on kind of the lower plan, some people are on the higher plan. We got $120,000 in project revenue, and about $80,000 in monthly recurring revenue. We see those numbers in the survey that we saw with

6:04the uh 40 to 50%. And that's $200,000 pre-tax, pre-expenses. Um, perfectly possible in the US with a two to three person team um with processes with great monthly recurring revenue products, not just website maintenance plans, but a little bit more of like those added on things. And um and that's a good, you know, a good goal, stretch goal. Okay. So again, not the maximum, not the minimum, but what I think is potential. If you want to say, gosh, I just have no idea what I should reach for, what's possible, maybe

6:42I'm giving you a good starting line. Now, if you want to learn more about how to do this, I have care plan courses. I have a fivepack series of crafting the care plan, agency processes, automation, building your sport team, and sales. Um those care plan courses are gosh I think over 500 600 have gone through these. Um we have about 40 50 coaching students every month. I see it. I live it. I breathe it and it works. So if you're looking of like I got to start somewhere. I got to increase my recurring revenue. That's a

7:19great place to start. [Music]