The Ground Up - Things to research before you get started.
Hi my name is Markus Nelson I live in Atlanta Georgia with my Wife and daughter Ashley and Saturday. I have been running a web design and development company( bluelightlabs.com ) for over 8 years. Before I lived up the North Georgia Mountains for quite some time where there was not a great local market. I went to collage in Savannah Georgia for computer animation and found that it was not my calling in the ( Making a living world ), unless I was to work for a company and give up my quest for entrepreneurship and personal freedom.
Let me get this straight off the bat, ( Don't do this!!) and what i mean by ( Don't do This!! ) it is not easy, it is defiantly not a get rich quick way to build a company. I am 33 years old now and can't even begin to tell you the amount of energy, stress and dedication it takes to make a company work. There are so many things I should have known earlier before I jumped into this endeavor and it is these things that motivated me to write this article. I am not the best author for sure, but I hope this information helps other people that are interested in building a web design company find it more tangible. There is also a great deal of stuff I want to share with fellow entrepreneurs that will hopefully provide a great head start to succeeding in this market.
I have broke this article down into a few small sections, these are the areas that have been the most important to me in the success with business. If any readers have any questions or comments feel free to contact me from our website at http://www.bluelightlabs.com/contact/I will be more than happy to respond on any questions or comments regarding this article. On a note I am not the most grammatically correct person so if you find any mistakes save yourself some time - I already know my weaknesses and don't need to be reminded of them anymore. I have a small blog I started that has other information similar to this article; you can check it out at http://www.atlantawebdesign.blogspot.com.
Ok now that we have that out of the way - here is the breakdown.
It all boils down to research -
Well this a topic that really gets to me, I never really did much research to start with and wish I did from the very beginning. Heads up - you can never do enough research. I cannot tell you how important research is. If I had done more research I would be miles ahead of myself and my company would be stronger to this day.
I know this is a broad term but it is an important one none the less. I started by doing the only research I did at my first Job. I was part of a small IT department working for my dad's company. I was working and living with a co-worker that was an anal overachiever that made my life miserable. Since he was always on top of stuff before I could even get to the scene I spent a good amount of time in my cubicle surfing other web design company websites looking for ideas onhow to create my own little niche business. I literally spent a great deal of my employer’s money just getting prepared to start my own company. Everything from our original logo to the first official search engine submission of my website in 2000 was done from my little cubical without a window.
Our proposal has gone through many different renditions but going out of your way to actually request a proposal from a competitor is a great way to start building your own. The proposal is a huge piece of your company; you will use it over and over and make many versions of it so remember to spend a great deal of time researching and looking at other competitor examples. When the phone starts ringing at least 70% percent of the time, possible clients are looking
for not only a price quote but also an idea of how your company presents itself. Presentation is a huge part of what you want to research how you present your company will attract certain types of clients so think about the type of client you want to attract. For example, do you want to dive straight in and go after fortune 500 companies with huge budgets or do you want to target small to medium local businesses. Blue Light Labs after 8 years is now starting to make this next step toward going after the larger company contracts. What I love about large company contracts are you don't need as many and you don't feel like you are juggling your time with a great deal of small ones. Of course attracting these types of organizations is not an easy issue. Blue Light Labs has built hundreds of websites but I feel only 10-30 of them are worth putting into a portfolio to attract larger more serious organizations. This does not mean that the other websites we built are not portfolio worthy but what it does mean is you only get a limited period of time to hook a potential client on your website so be specific on how you want to show the quality of your work.
to waist your time trying to do all this legal stuff yourself, unless you are into that type of thing. It is money well spent in my opinion. I would recommend looking and interviewing a few before choosing the one that will work for your web design company.
Vertical markets are markets in witch you can target more intensely. Lets say you want to go after Real Estate Related companies or you want to primarily design and develop e commerce websites. Finding a vertical market that is in demand is a great way to get an idea of how you want to present your company to either a local market or a national or international market. In conclusion as much as I could keep going on and on about researching different ways and angles to approach your building your companies foundation though research this is a short list of what I would recommend are the most important.
Incorporation:
What type of web site design firm do you want to become. Are you a one man show, or do you want to put together a team? Find out what types of incorporation will work the best for your goals. Becoming a LLC vs. a C or an S corporation gives you different options and tax breaks. Your company name and it's domain name will stick with you thought the life of your company so give it a good amount of thought. Eventually your company name will start to become a way to market yourself with word of mouth or visual representation, so take it seriously.
Vertical Markets
What do you think are your strengths and weaknesses and what types of clients do you want to attract? How do you want to present your company when you do manage to get exposure and traffic to your website?
Other money outlets
On top of designing websites what other ways can you make money with your services. Do you want to offer Hosting, Internet Marketing or resell ecommerce gateway and domain services? I have to tell you Blue Light Labs would not survive if I did not get into the hosting business.
Hosting allowed for me to have a recurring source of revenue during slow months where we where focusing on improving internal company issues.
Do you have any startup capitol? What are the best ways to use it? I only had $200 dollars in my pocket when I started, so I didn't have much to work with. It is so easy to get too exited and spend a ton of money software, hardware, marketing, office space printed material ext. If you don't have a great deal of money browse though things like gorilla marketing blogs or books, find a good hosting provider to work with that will give you a flexible reseller account.
Drive!!
You have to have drive; drive is the one thing that most successful entrepreneurs have. You have to be driven you have to work hard and you have to keep up with your competition. If you are not a driven individual stop reading this and forget it. Believe me there is no easy way into this business. It is competitive hard and requires many hours of dedication and hard work. The pay off is amazing though, in my opinion having a 4 man company that has almost hit the one million dollar mark this year is a huge achievement and something I am proud of. I don't personally make a great deal of money, most of it goes back into the company or toward all the dept I occurred while struggling when I started it.
Think Big
Try not to get too comfortable stay on top of your technology, competition and all the constant changing aspects of your deliverables.
People
If you are planning on building a team people are obviously important. One the biggest things I pride myself on is my team. I was not afraid to brush up mycompetition because my competition became my company. I spent a great deal of time meeting other web designers and developers and building relationships with other entrepreneurs like me. All this social networking naturally allowed me to build a team that was perfect for Blue Light Labs. Travis Christopher and David Warren from liquidsquidstudios.com became our sales and design department, David Hunt from Webuddha.com and Holodyn.com became our development and research department and finally I just slipped into what was naturally my strength the marketing and project management department. Are you getting the picture?
Surround yourself with people smarter than you and learn from it, keep yourself open to change and new technologies, and for god sake enjoy what you do..
Markus Nelson...
