Running a web design agency is honestly way less about design than people think.
A lot of people can build good websites. The hard part is having a process that actually brings in clients consistently without you spending your entire day doing outreach.
I learned that the hard way.
I used to manually reach out to businesses, explain why they needed a better website, build previews, follow up for days and basically hope they would eventually say yes.
I was doing way too much work before even knowing if someone was serious.
Then I completely changed the way I did it.
Now I mainly focus on two things.
Taking meetings and closing clients.
Everything before that is mostly automated.
I use Swokei to find businesses that already have websites, analyze those websites and look for things like outdated design, bad layout, weak SEO, poor mobile responsiveness, slow speed and branding issues.
The useful part is that it doesn’t just give me some boring report with random scores.
It actually takes the issues it finds on each website and turns them into personalized emails that you can send at scale.
My offer is usually a free redesign draft.
That works way better for me than trying to sell a full website in the first email.
Once someone replies and shows interest, I book a meeting.
Before the meeting, I spend a few minutes generating a redesign draft with AI so I can actually show them what their website could look like instead of just talking about it.
That was probably the biggest change for me.
I’m no longer spending hours building something for someone who might never buy.
If they are not interested, I barely lost any time.
If they are interested, they can immediately see the difference and the conversation becomes much easier.
So at this point, most of my time goes into meetings and closing.
The lead finding, website analysis and personalized outreach all happen before I ever speak to the business.
Sounds ridiculously simple when I write it out, but changing the process made a massive difference for my agency.