A presentation at WordCamp Santa Clarita Online in April 2020 in by Francesca Marano
My name is Francesca, I am the WordPress Community Manager at SiteGround, the independently owned web hosting company with over 16 years of experience. Giving back to the WordPress community in the form of talks is part of my job description. I get to do the thing I love the most: share knowledge. Sometimes from my experience and sometimes from the collective knowledge of the talented SiteGround team. In addition, my role in the WordPress community includes an active participation in the Community Team and in Core. I had the honour to co-lead the last two WordPress releases.
Before that I was a freelancer that built websites for other freelancers. My first year in business was a disaster, this talk is born out of that experience.
Eight months into my new life as a business owner, I failed miserably. I spent way more than I earned. Half of that money went into basic life stuff, like rent, bills and food, but half went on training materials, like e-courses and ebooks. Continuous learning is very important, but if you are like me and need to be motivated, the self—training option is not great because you are not accountable and you’ll probably end up with a Dropbox full of materials that you’ll never really finish reading. I had also other expenses: I bought a new computer because of course, I needed the latest, greatest iMac, and I hired an accountant, which was not required by the fiscal format I picked. And to be honest I took too many days off because being a freelancer is setting your own hours, and be free, right? Wrong.
So I had to go back to work to keep paying the rent and the bills. To my surprise, people kept asking me to do work for them: at that time I managed to gain some popularity in Italy as a website maker through my blog and my social media presence, so I kept freelancing as a side gig. Not great for work-life balance, but it helped me improve my businesswoman skills, and my WordPress skills.
Fast forward a year more or less, I quit my job and went solo again. At the end of 2013 I billed people for 18k, which was pretty much the maximum I could do with the fiscal format I picked at the time.
So what happened in less than 12 months? How was I able to get to a point where I could sustain myself as a freelancer.
I read this book “The Right Brain Business Plan” buy an American coach, Jennifer Lee. Unlike my first attempts at self-training, I actually did the work. I did all the exercises and at the end of it, I had a crazy looking Business Plan that worked for me. It was funny looking and maybe naive, but it helped me get to my goal and it helped me trace a map that I followed for all the years I keep being self-employed.
First things first, what is this business plan we are talking about?
This is a definition that used to be on Wikipedia - they changed it slightly now but the substance remains the same - and it’s pretty accurate. “A business plan is a formal statement of business goals, reasons they are attainable, and plans for reaching them. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.”
Except this is the reaction that 95% of the creative types have when they read in the first paragraph about a “formal statement”. And I consider most of us, in the WordPress industry, creatives: designers, developers, content marketers. And to be honest, to be a freelancer, whatever your job is, you need to be pretty crafty.
It’s a way to find clarity amongst all the ideas you have. Most creative types play with tens of business ideas at the same time. Including developers; they usually have notes full of ideas for plugins, talks, improvement to another open-source software. And you need to write them down, because ideas tend to get all messed up and vague if they stay in your brain for too long with other ideas. It’s basically a brain dump that gets shaped. And it’s a map, it’s your GPS to navigate your business when things get a bit unclear. And things will get unclear a lot of times.
A plan that will allow you to earn a living from the things you love doing: it includes goals you want to reach and metrics to check how you are doing.
I was very happy with the results I achieved but not 100% happy with the format and the method of Jennifer Lee’s book, so I came up with my own product. I wrote an e-book in 2014, only in Italian, and created a class that was taken by almost 350 people, online and offline. I gave this talk at numerous events over the year. Apparently, a lot of us are a bit scared of business plans ;-)
You may have a pre-existing idea of what a business plan looks like
These are two examples of what a business plan looked to me before I read “The Right Brain Business Plan”, including the business plan for Yahoo from 1995!
These are also business plans! From two of my students that went on to build businesses that they started planning during one of the online classes I gave.
The point is: it doesn’t matter what a business plan looks like, what matters is that it has all the information you need to guide you through building a business and that you use it. Really use it. Go back to it every time you need to take a decision for your business: saying yes to a client, hiring a contractor, create a social media strategy.
This is why I am so fond of these creatives format. They can be kept on your desk and perused every time you need to.
I did it for five years. 2013, 2014, 2015 I did the “crafter” version.
Then in 2016 and 2017, I focused on the finances. The mission and the values where there, so I adjusted the numbers and tweaked the target and the offer a little bit.
It doesn’t matter if you go for a more classical approach or a creative format, there are some sections of the Business Plan that need to be there.
The first rule of the business plan is: do it. Start today on a piece of paper, but do it.
I mean it :) Remember I went from losing 14k in 2012 to making 18k the year after and over 50k in my last whole year as a freelancer, 2016.
This is the founding concept of the business plan. Everything else comes from this. Make a vision board. Ask friends how they would define what you do. Write 127 pages of ideas. Pick how to do it to land on the answer to the most important question you need to ask yourself: Why do you do what you do? Of course you do it to make money! But dig a bit deeper. Be careful when you pick it and how you communicate it. My first one wasn’t great: it was “Help people give birth to their online presence in a easy, affordable way”. Result? Tens of requests for ultra cheap websites, with a desired turnover time of 2 weeks, no matter the scope of the project. I changed it to “Help creative people build an online presence” and I was able to raise my prices and profile.
Don’t fear the niche, the niche is where you can be successful and probably have fewer competitors. I say this all the time: the easiest way not to make any money is trying to sell to everybody.
Go online, look for templates for Buyer Personas or Ideal Client. If you already have clients check for emerging patterns. If you don’t, go with your fantasy, but make it believable. An ideal client is not an idealised client, is a real person with fears, needs, dreams, etc…
And if you have multiple targets, craft a product or a service for each specific one! Think about businesses that look like they sell to everyone. Supermarkets or hosting. Now look deeper: you will see different offerings aimed at different targets. In supermarkets, this is done by placing things in a specific way on the shelves. Online this is done through funnels, landing pages, paid adv campaigns.
It’s time to create an offer people can’t refuse.
How do you do that? By forgetting about your ego and immerse yourself in your clients’ world. How can you solve their problems? That’s your offer. You don’t create a service or a product to show off. You create it to make money, and the easiest way to make money is solving someone else’s pain.
You have a mission, you have an offer, you know who you want to sell to. Now go market yourself and sell your stuff! I feel that a lot of freelancers are lacking in this department. There is no shame in selling yourself. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about your potential customer pains and you can help them.
The first year I did my business plan and I followed it religiously I set a number that I was comfortable with, but I had to sell too many websites to hit that target. The year after that I doubled my prices. And the year after that again. The first year in business I worked on a staggering number of websites: 24! In 2017 I worked only half a year as a freelancer and I made the same money out of 5 websites. Set a goal, but also define how you are going to hit it: if you sell products you can go for quantity. If you work on custom-built solutions you can not work on too many projects. So what is this sum made of? Write it down. And remember, you need to track finances regularly. Track income and expenses: especially expenses, you probably are spending more than you imagine.
You need a squad! When you do a traditional business plan or you fill in the Business Model Canvas, another tool that I love, this is called Key partnership. You need people to succeed. I am not fond of motivational quotes most of the time, but this is one is very true: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. You need a support network made of contractors, professionals that you are required to have (they might be a lawyer, an accountant or a notary), peers. Family.
For years I said that competitors don’t exist, because of rule number 10, that we are about to see. Then for years I thought not only they existed but they all needed to break both arms so they would stop working for a while. These approached won’t get you very far. Truth is competition is real and the only way to confront it is by doing your homework: study them, see what they do and don’t do the same, spot opportunities in what they don’t do. Position yourself in a different way: even if you have the same skills and you are selling the same exact thing, try a way to do it differently. Tone of voice, content, branding: these are all things you need to consider to set yourself apart from the others in your market, especially in a saturated one.
And finally, be yourself! When my kid was growing up he had this wonderful book called “You are you and you are special” - I think it’s a wonderful mantra to have in life. And it is true: after you analysed everything, take a good look at this professional you are describing in your business plan. Is that you? Do you need to go against your values, your nature, your lifestyle to achieve the goal? If the answer is yes, go back and find a way to do the same thing while being your true self. Keeping up appearances for a long period of time is exhausting! So don’t fake it until you make it, use those energies to adjust your business plan and make it work for who you are.
Now there is only one thing left to do, write your business plan!
Let’s continue the conversation francesca.marano@siteground.com siteground.com siteground.com/blog Twitter @FrancescaMarano + @SiteGround
