How I went from freelancer to owning a top graphic design agency in 3 years

I used to hate my iPhone alarm, waking me up every morning at 6.30am. Just the sound of that alarm tone gives me shudders now. Fumbling through the bedsheets trying to hit that silent button and just mashing the screen until it shuts the f**k up. I’d have around 8 alarms set in 10 minute increments from 6.30am until 8am. As hard as I tried, I’d always end up getting up at 8am. Although I was working for myself as a graphic design freelancer I just couldn’t motivate myself. I felt that I was working my arse off for my clients and not getting much back in return. Quite a large proportion of people treat freelancers like shit, they pay next to nothing and treat you like they’ve employed you full time. Another thing that really annoys me is how deadlines are either “we need this website built by tomorrow” or “no rush, we’re still sorting a lot of stuff out on our end” 1 week (with no communication from them) later “WE NEED IT NOW WHERE IS IT?”

Working from home isn’t as great as you’d think. Home is now your workplace and your workplace is now your home; no escape. The room you’ve setup as your “office” is probably a dimly lit, cramped room which lights up when you hit the keyboard to wake your computer. The screen lights up and your pupils contract, much in the same way they would if you had a 9–5 job routine and your front door opens, the sun hits your eyes and you wake up fully prepared for the hellish commute to whichever company you work for.

This all changed for me though once I put into practice the points I’ve listed below. I became driven, you could even say I was completely obsessed with building my agency. I worked 18 hour days for months on end, and loved every second of it.

Anyway, I digress, time to get to the point and tell you how you can take your freelance gig up to the next level and run an agency.

Whether you’re working from home, hotdesking or “starbucksdesking*” you’re a one man band working with a small amount of clients, work is sporadic and you’re undercharging for work that’s probably as good as most local “design agencies”, the difference is you’re a freelancer and the client knows that. They’ve hired a freelancer for one reason only… price. The client has a small budget but you’ve agreed to do the job even though you know it’s going to take you days / weeks or even months for something that works out at an hourly rate below minimum wage. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking freelancers, there are some great people out there who make a great living from freelancing, but this is after they’ve built a good client base, they’ve marketed themselves well and have agencies even outsourcing work to them. But as you’re reading this, let’s presume you’re not in that kind of position.

Maybe you’ve self branded, maybe you’ve created a company name and you’re pretending to be an agency. Either way it doesn’t matter. Ask yourself — where are your leads coming from? Are you trawling PeoplePerHour, Freelancer.com or one of the many other hives packed full of cheap, shitty designers based in India ready to work for a fraction of your price, no matter how low. This is your main problem and this is why you need to stop taking those kind of jobs.

Ok, so let’s presume you’ve been freelancing for a year or so, you’ve taken on maybe 30 jobs in that time and you’ve earned a living, had a couple of jobs that have made you a nice chunk to see you through the periods without work. You’ve read a few books like “the 4 hour work week” which — surprise surprise didn’t magically change your life or work ethic. You need to change something but — what is that “thing”.
This is what you need to do.

Just a quick note, I’m not going to list the usual stuff which you should be doing anyway, such as setting long and short term goals, having a solid business plan, etc. I’m just going to tell you what I personally did and where it got me.

The Plan

1. Wake the f**ck up, you don’t want to be worrying about when your next invoice will be paid, to do that you’re going to have to change your work ethic and treat your home office like a “real office” You’re going to create your own graphic/web design agency. You’re going to create a brand, your brand, your website, everything. This is the beginning, so get hyped!

2. As ridiculous as this may sound, I can promise you it works. Get up early. Go through your morning routine without rushing. Have a shower, get dressed for work, don’t work in your pyjamas, I’m really serious about this, you need to be dressed for work, it puts you in the right mindset. Make sure your office room is clean so you can think clearly. When you enter your “office” you’re now at work.

3. Shut the door to your office and don’t allow for any distractions. You need to stay focused on the task at hand.

4. Define your target audience, a good place to start is small businesses, SME’s and sole traders. Once you’ve got a couple of SME’s under your belt and you impress them, they’ll keep coming back even if it’s just a yearly catalogue.

5. Come up with a name for your company, something unique and catchy.

6. Buy the URL for your new company.

7. Get business cards printed with your company logo and your information. Don’t call your self the CEO of “companynameX” it’s just ridiculous and prospective clients will see it as a red flag. Just call yourself “Graphic Designer” or “Senior Designer” or if you’ve registered as a Ltd company then “Director”

8. Build yourself a website, if you know wordpress then buy a theme and just get yourself a stunning looking homepage that shows your work off. You’ll also need content, if you’re no good at writing content then hire someone, it won’t cost much. You’ll need the following pages: Home, About us (note the word us), services, portfolio, contact and Blog. Make sure your content isn’t all about you and how amazing you are, gear the content up for the client, talk about how you can benefit them and what they’ll get from your services. Remember most companies don’t care about you, they just want to know that they’re going to get what they pay for and on time. Another tip: Don’t list prices anywhere. Your pricing needs to be flexible based on who contacts you. I can’t stress how important this is. You need to price things up based on the task at hand and how complex a project it is. Work it out at an hourly rate.

9. Create a team of around 5 people. Ask your friends if they’re ok with using their names and photos and give them positions within your company. This might sound a bit immoral but it’s not so deal with it. No company will call and ask to speak to a specific person, it’s going to be you answering the phone if anyone calls, but most people will enquire through your contact form.

10. Market yourself, create a behance, twitter, instagram profile. Share your work, show your passion for what you do. Use hashtags that small businesses use, that way you’ll get in front of them.

11. Learn SEO. You don’t want to be paying some dodgy cheap SEO company £400 a month for something you could do in 1 hour a week. The main thing to do is decide which keywords you want to rank for. Let’s keep it local for now, but not too local. I chose to focus my attention on the keywords “graphic design agency Birmingham” and got to 1st position in 1 year. This was all self taught SEO, which these days is mainly just about sharing content.

12. Write blogs, and lots of them, share your knowledge about design / web design or whichever discipline you know the most about. This works on so many levels, it shows your potential clients that you know what the hell your talking about and Google bloody loves the stuff, Blogs are like crack to Google. If you want to really step your game, create a couple of external niche blogs, either pay someone to write them for you or write them yourself. Post 1 a week minimum. Within the blog body text include your keywords as anchor text and link back to your main website but not just to the homepage, to the relevant service page.

13. Get a Google verified address, if you can buy a virtual office like a PO box in the area you want to rank well in, do that. Set up your google plus page, enter the address for your new “address” and wait for the pin code to arrive. Once it’s arrived you can verify and move onto the next step.

14. Get Google webmaster tools and verify your domain so that your website, domain and google plus are all linked up nicely.

15. Look into Schema Markup and do it. I don’t want this to turn into an SEO tutorial so just teach yourself. Moz is the best resource out there.

16. Once you have an online presence you can start reaching out to companies on linkedin. Make sure you have a 100% completed profile and build your network, get endorsed and so on. Start talking to people, build relationships. Even if you don’t get an immediate job from them at least you’re in the forefront of their minds. You should also contribute to groups, post your blogs there (the ones from your main company website). Find groups where small business owners are going to be, don’t go posting in a graphic design group, they’re not your target market.

Ok so this is the setup stage done, rinse and repeat steps 1,2,3, 10,11,12 until you have a good online presence. If you do it right your google rank will be on the rise quite quickly. If you can’t handle the workload you can outsource, but be very careful who you outsource to, avoid the cheapest bidders, go for recommended freelancers or friends, a bad job by a freelancer can ruin your reputation. If a client wants to come to your office, just make something up an arrange to meet at their office or at a coffee shop.

Building your agency

Ok, so you’ve got a few clients under your belt, and you’ve got regular work, well done! I hope by now you’re not having to resort to freelancer websites.

Find office space. This is going to be your first big outgoing payment as an agency, but it’s the most important. Don’t sign a contract for a 12 month lease on an office you can’t afford, it could destroy your company sooner than you think. Get a small space, something you know you can afford. If you find the right kind of building or leasing agency they will let you upgrade to a bigger space at any time, that’s what we do. Try to find a building that’s split into multiple offices and has a shared meeting / conference room. You don’t want to bring your clients into your box office with no staff. Take them straight to the meeting room and offer them a drink if this is the case.

Staff: Now this is the hardest part, but it doesn’t need to cost you much. If you’ve built a good enough presence online you’ll be getting applications from people who want work experience or internships especially over summer. If this doesn’t happen then reach out to local universities, many designers need to complete an “on the job” module effectively and will be available for up to 3 months at a a time for 1 or 2 days a week. Interview them and go with whoever shows the biggest desire to learn and commit to your company. Also, you don’t want them to be completely inept, so they need to have a strong portfolio, don’t expect the best designs ever, as long as they know the tools of the trade, you can help them. It’s win win for both parties. If you need the support of someone with more experience then hire a freelancer to come into the office 1 or 2 days a week dependant on workload, you’ll need to find a few people like this and keep them on record. If you have a big project come in you know that you can call them up and hire them for a set fee or an hourly rate. The interns / work exeperience staff can help back you and the more experienced designer(s) up. The other option is finding a business partner. If you know another freelancer who’s maybe a friend, offer them a stake in the company and share the profits with them. They will forego an hourly rate but they will own the company with you as a director. This is what I did. My company consists of 2 directors, myself as creative director and a very savvy marketing director.

Launch the company officially. Now that you have an office and staff you can hold an event, invite current clients and also email local companies, let them know you’ve arrived and you’re their local one stop shop for anything creative. Network with attendees and build relationships, follow up with emails etc.

Attend local networking events, get your name out there. Take staff with you if you need to, just talk to as many people as possible. Dress smart even if you don’t require that in the office. I always dress to impress at networking events, but don’t wear a full suit. I just feel that this isn’t right for a creative agency, wear a high quality shirt, and jeans with smart shoes like brogues or Chelsea boots. You need to dress as the person you aspire to be, a successful creative running a respectable design agency. You don’t need to spend a fortune either.

Get a CRM, now that you’ve got plenty of clients and leads you’re going to need to manage the flow of them. Something like BASE is really good and is what we use. It tracks everything from leads to current clients, reminders and even projects earnings.

Proposals — This is a really important part. You need to put together a stunning proposal template so that when someone calls up and asks for a quote on a website or whatever it may be, you can simply pull up the proposal in indesign, customise it to that client’s requirements. Also do a bit of research on the company and refer to your knowledge of that in the proposal. This will win you contracts as most competitors will just send out a very generic looking 2 page proposal. Ours are around 10 pages depending on the budget the client has and the importance of us winning that job is.

Get an invoicing system, we use Harvest, it’s cheap and looks professional when you send out an estimate or invoice, it even has the option to integreate with Stripe so you can take payments online.

If you’re a Ltd company you must have a business account by law, so get that sorted, I recommend Santander if you’re in the UK.

Hire an accountant to manage your books and file your tax returns. Trust me, it’s worth it.

You’ll have the flow of it by now, I don’t need to tell you much more from here besides, keep the quality of your work high, don’t compromise on your rates. If you’re in the UK and outside of London I would say set a minimum hourly rate of £50 to begin with.

Terms & Conditions

List your terms & conditions on your website, you’re going to get a client here and there who either won’t pay or keeps messing you around, changing the brief and adding extra features. If you have terms & conditions you’re protected. Make sure you put a link to it on the proposal / estimate before you sign a contract with them.

There’s a bit more too it that that, you need to have complete devotion to building your agency and be prepared for it to take over your life. But I’ll leave it at that.

Good luck and remember never give up, you’re going to have periods where you have no work on and little money, it does get better believe me — but don’t be fooled into thinking when you’ve got loads of contracts coming in and your banking large amounts of money it gets easier. It actually gets harder and that’s why you need to invest back into your company and staff to ensure you have the best team possible who respect deadlines and want your agency to succeed. Give them shares and incentives if necessary. I often give bonus payments for a job well done.

Bonus tip!

When you sign up for google places, twitter ads, linkedin for business you will most likely receive an advertising voucher in the first month or so. What I would recommend doing is run an ad with longtail keywords (Google this). If you're lucky you may win your first contract from this free credit.1

Thanks for reading!

James