Ep 88 | How to get consistent Webflow work | with Stephen Wise
May 7, 2024
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Stephen Wise, a creator and entrepreneur, shares insights on building profitable internet businesses and managing Demand Flow agency. He discusses failures in projects, ignoring business aspects, and the importance of focus. Wise also highlights challenges in freelancing, client relationships, sales processes, and optimizing marketing strategies.
Entrepreneurship offers autonomy in financial earnings and lifestyle choices.
Clear project boundaries and upfront agreements are essential to avoid prolonged and unprofitable engagements.
Maintaining focus, specialization, and balancing workloads are crucial for sustaining growth and success in freelancing.
Deep dives
Freedom and Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is driven by the desire for freedom, allowing individuals to control their time, earnings, and decisions. The speaker believes in deviating from traditional paths to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities that offer autonomy in financial earnings and lifestyle choices.
Transition to Demand Flow
Stephen Wise transitioned from freelance web design to establishing Demand Flow, a design and development service catering to startups through subscription packages. Despite initial struggles and failures, Wise's shift toward building a business stemmed from a desire to explore new ventures and learn from mistakes.
Lessons from a Prolonged Project
A client-induced three-week project extended to three years due to constant scope changes and inconsistent communication. This experience prompted the implementation of clear project boundaries, upfront agreements, and a retainer-based model to avoid similar prolonged and unprofitable engagements in the future.
Importance of View on Sales as an Investment
The podcast emphasizes viewing sales as an investment for the client rather than a cost, which can lead to building trust and advocacy with potential clients. By openly discussing whether the service is a good fit and being transparent about outcomes, such as doubling money, it creates a strong demand flow. The importance of having a marketing and sales process in place, like defining a customer profile and targeting specific roles, such as founders or marketing heads, is highlighted to attract the right clients and build long-term relationships.
Need for Focus and Avoiding Shiny Object Syndrome
The episode discusses the significance of maintaining focus and avoiding distractions. Highlighting the need to specialize and concentrate on a particular skill set to solidify a freelance career, it cautions against losing focus when experiencing success and exploring various projects. The importance of dedicating focused 'life seasons' to different objectives, balancing workloads, and acknowledging the challenges of scalability while maintaining high quality are crucial aspects of sustaining growth and success.
I'm your host, Jack, your failure connoisseur, and today my guest is Stephen Wise.
He’s a creator and entrepreneur. He started as a freelance web designer but now he does a range of things like writing, making videos, running his agency, DEMAND FLOW.
He’s obsessed with figuring out how we can live better and build profitable internet businesses.
Demandflow is design and development on demand for different subscription packages.
There are now 7 people in the agency despite only launching in 2022.
So, the agency is moving in the right direction and he seems to be managing to maintain a balanced lifestyle too but has it always been rosy?
The failures that we’ll talk about in today’s episode are:
The 3 week project that turned into 3+ years…
Ignoring the scary S word… Not running things like a business