I know you’re busy. I’m busy. Everyone is busy nowadays, so I’m letting the rabbit out of the hat early. I sell time. Yes, that’s right, I sell time. Our most precious commodity as entrepreneurs & business owners by far.
The funniest thing about “selling time” is that I had no idea that is what I really did. I thought I was building websites, designing logos, managing SEO and marketing campaigns for small business owners and I was happy to be doing so! We are really good at what we do and always leave our clients in a better place than when they came to us. So imagine my surprise when I realized that I am surely a wizard of sorts. A benevolent deity who magically bestows time upon my clients. Yes, I must be!
I’ll explain.
So, you wanted to DIY your website for your small business and you even got the ball rolling quickly! You’re a quick study so you imagine it will take you no time at all to cobble together your website on Wix or Squarespace. Let’s assume that you’ve already spent a couple of months deciding on a name for your business researching all the government agencies and filing the proper paperwork with them to secure that name. Maybe you have already been doing business for a while and decided now it’s time for a website.
In either case, moving forward, you will need to dedicate some time to learning to interface with whatever content management system you choose at minimum. Then you’ll need the time to research how to make an effective web design, how to set up contact forms and call to action, the best practices for SEO, how to optimize your page for speed, etc. Now that’s a lot of time just researching and learning just a few things about my industry, now consider the time to actually implement these key elements to having a successful web design and website.
So where is all that time going to come from? Since we all have the same amount of time per day, what area will be sacrificed to accomplish this goal? Family time? Sleep? Hanging out with your friends? Watching TV? Running the other important operational aspects of your business? Something has to give to make this happen.
So, that leaves you in one of three situations. You either spent close to a year or possibly longer starting your business and/or website, you haven’t started your website at all, or you rushed the whole process and jacked a website up within a couple of weeks.
Either way, you have done an injustice to your business. You can’t take back that lost time in starting your business. So you spent all that TIME for what now? To have a site that gains you close to, or actually, no new business. Or did you lose that momentum you felt, that fire? Did other competitors pop up in your space over that time? Did your original competition shore up some of the weaknesses that you wanted to exploit? A lot can happen in a year.
Let’s say you got your site up in a couple of weeks. How’s it working for you? Do you have the conversion you had hoped for, or are you wondering why nobody is calling or filling out your contact form? Do you even know how much traffic your site is getting? How are your rankings on Google and other search engine’s results pages?
My guess is not great, maybe even really poor. Unless you are in an extremely small niche market, you are probably barely getting noticed online. Let’s face it, you didn’t do any keyword research and you definitely didn’t set up any on-site SEO.
You probably didn’t consider that your site’s design played that big of a factor in its success either. The placement of your call-to-action elements, image quality, and where the content is displayed all affects how your user reacts to your site, or their desire to read further or stay on your site at all.
Your user decides within a couple of seconds if they will use you or bounce to a competitor based solely on the look and feel of your website. What I’m saying is, that just having a website isn’t good enough anymore. It needs to impress, build trust, and encourage your users to buy something from you.
My point is, literally all of my clients are busy and, like you, none of them have time to take care of some of the services we provide. Let alone provide the level of detail and care we afford those services. In this paradox, a symbiosis is born. You have no time to build a new website and here I am still, a few paragraphs later, telling you “I sell time!” but you still have not contacted me.
I know you want to watch Jimmy Fallon with the fam. I’m telling you. I’m the time god, I can make that happen for you! I know 30 extra MINUTES of sleep would be a godsend to you and you know I’m here waiting to help you ease the pressure, and still, you have not called me.
I suggest, at minimum, speaking with a professional in the industry before attempting to add the web designer hat to your already full rack of business owner head-ware. Free up those precious hours, days even, and spend them on building your business. Just give us a ring.
And for those of you who still have a day job and are building your business or side hustle, you have even less time than the rest. So if you are serious about starting a business, and walking into your job tomorrow morning might seriously kill you, not only because you don’t like your job, but you can’t go on living someone else’s dream. Because the feeling in your stomach won’t go away and the voices in your head telling you “You need to quit this job and start your own business” are just getting louder and louder… We’ve been waiting to work with you.
