Start Your 6-figure High-Priced Web Agency Within One Year — Realistic or Utopian?

The key steps and pitfalls of our case study.

Disclaimer: It’s obviously NOT realistic for everyone, as you require both the right mindset and the right strategy. Otherwise, it’s simply utopian or gambling.

…but slowly, let me explain.

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Putting it into context

When I say 6-figures, I mean earning at least $100,000 in specific time period (let’s say one year here).

This is the top-1% of upper-class income in India or Pakistan.

This is a very well-paid tech job here in Germany.

This is a well-paid tech job in the UK or Switzerland.

…and this is just an average-paying job in Silicon Valley, USA (even every intern/trainee at the big players earns that much).

Context 1: Different countries have different price levels (e.g., salary, cost of living) and, therefore, also a different perception of 6-figures.

From a business perspective, it becomes even more obvious:

You must sell a product or service worth $25,000 four times a year, i.e., only once per quarter, or only four clients per year.

… or you must sell a product or service worth $10,000 ten times a year, i.e., less than once per month, or ten clients per year.

… or you must sell a product or service worth $5,000 20 times a year, i.e., less than twice per month, or 20 clients per year.

This annual number of clients is absolutely nothing for a web agency or easy to get, as we will see later.

Context 2: The same different perception of 6-figures also applies to employees (trading time for money) and entrepreneurs (trading value for money).

If you’re just getting started, you’re probably asking yourself: who the hell is going to pay me $5,000 or even $25,000 for my service?

Simple answer: People for whom you create value or solve a problem that is worth so much to them.

This means the price of your service corresponds to the value (!) you create for the customer, and this value varies from customer to customer, e.g., based on his perception and/or the return of investment (ROI) you create indirectly for him.

Just as a mind game: let’s say, your client is an income millionaire, and he wants to have a troublesome problem solved that takes him one or several hours a day. Don’t you think he wouldn’t want to pay ‘only’ $5,000 (< 0.5% of his salary) if it would save him one or several hours a day that he could spend elsewhere? Of course, he would do that, because time is the most important good for such people.

Even less wealthy people, e.g., ‘normal’ employees give a larger percentage of their salary to solve time-consuming or unwanted problems (e.g., house or car cleaning, tax consultation, caregiving, baby or dog sitting, and many more).

Context 3: The perception of the price is highly subjective, depending the problem being solved for your customer or the value your customer can derive from it.

So, if you think that $5,000 is a lot of money or even too much for your web agency service („I would never pay such a ‘large amount of money’ for my own service — why should anyone else do that?”, then you simply have either the wrong mindset or you are targeting the wrong clients.

Both, we will now try to resolve below.

The right mindset

The first ‘mindset shift’ you hopefully took away from the previous section: 6-figures are not much, depending on the context (the same line of argument could also be continued for 7- or 8-figures).

The same is true for a $ 5,000 service of a web agency. In many contexts, this even makes you a ‘low-price’ provider, and low prices could be even a deterrent for many wealthy clients as they draw conclusions about quality.

If you understand this, you will go into negotiations in a completely different way with completely different clients.

Besides this different ‘money mindset’, your ‘personal mindset’ should also be right (but that’s absolutely standard for doing business nowadays). This certainly includes the following areas, among others:

Fitness and (mental!) health: The absolute basic prerequisite, which many tech guys or desk workers forget, is that you need to be healthy and fit — and not only physically but also mentally (this also includes enough sleep and healthy food). Otherwise, you will quickly become exhausted with the initial workload required.

Productivity, discipline, and perseverance: If you are healthy and fit, then it’s just a matter of doing the right things consistently — and ‘consistently’ is meant no matter how hard things become. All this includes avoiding procrastination and wasting time on non-revenue-boosting activities.

Unwavering belief in yourself and in your skills: If you can be consistently productive, then it’s all about never — and I mean never, never ever — getting sidetracked from your goal and believing in yourself (even if you fail). This also includes excluding negative people from your social environment, making quick decisions, being able to act even faster, and taking responsibility.

Find a more successful mentor: I don’t know any successful person — and I meanwhile know ‘relatively’ many — who don’t have an even more successful mentor or advisor. Those will tell you the ‘shortcuts’ you need at the beginning. You don’t have to make the same mistakes as everyone else. This doesn’t have to be directly the 1:1 live coaching (especially since you probably don’t know anyone to begin with), but first of all, it is already helpful to understand the statements of the ‘anonymous’ mentors from valuable texts (e.g., books or amazing Medium stories).

If you don’t understand this ‘simple’ context relativization or can’t implement these mindset things alone, the following strategy will seem completely utopian to you and to many other business newcomers — and then it will be utopian to get a 6-figure web agency as well.

The right strategy

Up to this point, the above concepts can still be generally applied to all other businesses. Of course, the following strategy also works for many other ones, once you have understood it. But since I come from the tech or web agency world, I will explain the strategy using this example.

You now have the right perspective and know which client you need, namely, those for which your service creates the maximum value that is also reflected in the price the client is willing to pay — but how do you get them?

If you are a complete newbie to business and/or if you offer a new service, start with this step:

Step 1 (Get to know your target group and get the first testimonials): Seek as much ‘arbitrary’ customer contact as possible and discuss your service (no matter whether you get the job or not). If you get one job out of 10, 20, or 50 contacts, that’s great (learn to deal with rejection, as that is sales). Do the project awesome, get your first (in the best case) 5-star review or testimonial, improve your service constantly, and repeat — until you have ‘perfected’ your service and a series of outstanding reviews or testimonials.

A web agency, for instance, starts with an offer for really beautiful-looking landing pages that convert (let’s say for $500 each; of course, for more time-consuming projects such as dashboards or SaaS apps, take $2,000 or $3,000 each). The customer is more than happy, and you have a great review and can then simply add them to your portfolio later. Such ‘low-budget’ customers, you can easily find via B2B cold acquisition (e.g., search actively for company websites that need a redesign) or promote your service on a (freelancing) platform, e.g.,

Freelancer.com
Upwork
Fiverr (conditionally)

In the first quarter, you should train and polish your skills and mindset; build your portfolio and an awesome company website; learn to deal with rejections; and lose your fear of cold calls and 1:1 video meetings.

Note: the price in the examples above must of course be dramatically adapted to the service, the mass market target, and your level of experience/reviews.

The next step (Step 2)— or the first step for all others with ‘established’ offers in the mass market — is to improve your service and your company's appearance or market presence.

If you want to target ‘premium’ customers who can spend more money on your service, your service quality must of course keep up with them as well as your company appearance.

In the first step, you have already achieved your first successes, which you can invest monetarily and use in your marketing.

Now place paid ads to ‘buy’ leads automatically. Learn to increase your closing rate with a hard pre-qualification phase, and implement the projects again in a great way. Also, find ways to optimize the fulfillment, e.g., by re-using templates, designs, code snippets, etc.

Your goal should be to generate as many leads as possible. Only if you cannot keep up with the demand, increase the prices. Sure, you’ll lose some ‘low-budget’ customers straight away and get some new ‘higher-budget’ customers — but that’s exactly what you want: you’ll increase your customer value, i.e., you have more cash flow to reinvest in ads to generate more leads, and you have more time for the fulfillment to produce better output.

Step 3 (Repeat): When you are in this upward spiral, it’s just a matter of repeating step 2 until you reach ‘saturation’ for your high-priced service.

Referencing my initial claim and examples, it is then just simple math to 6-figures and more.

Outlook for the ‘real’ implementers: If you want to scale the whole thing further — and then no longer make 6-figures a year but a month, which is the path we are currently on — you primarily just have to do two things: optimise your processes (e.g., automation) and add employees …to be continued.

Bringing it all together

This is ONE proven way to start up a 6-figures business, in our case a web agency, in just one year: {context matters, get a mindset shift, get to know your target group, improve your service and appearance, place paid ads, increase prices if demand is too high}, reinvest and repeat all the actions mentioned in the brackets to get into the upward spiral.

In the long term and only then, you can also benefit from organic marketing, e.g., through SEO (website blog) and social media reach.

There are, of course, some other ways to make it — but as a newbie, my warm-hearted recommendation to you is as follows: you should definitely focus on a cash flow business (so, you can reinvest money fast) and get to know your target group early on, i.e., you should not need long development times, e.g., for implementing a software that nobody wants.

Get started with promoting and selling your service as soon as possible.

Either way, I hope you find this helpful, and I would be happy to hear your success story and experience as a business owner. Just write them below.

Some of my other related well-performing stories:

HAPPY READING, HAPPY IMPLEMENTING!

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Chris by thebootcode.io