 It's on Well, I thought I might start out with a story if that's okay with you Few months ago, we got a phone call from a friend and he wanted to come over to the office to Chat with my business partner Robert Ami about some ideas he had For switching from being an employee to being self-employed and his name was is Norbert And he's a really smart guy he was Perfecting and tweaking Production processes at factories and big companies and he thought hmm Maybe I can do better if I start working for myself So he came to the office and we chatted for like a few hours bouncing ideas off and he came really well-prepared He had designed his own logo and he had a website mock-up made in PowerPoint and Well at the end of the day The main tip that we had for him was please please hire a professional designer to do your logo your Corporate identity and your website for you because you know that'll make all the difference and If we even introduced him to Bjorn Bjorn is sitting over there is a brilliant freelance designer and he does all kinds of things from Designing logos and corporate identities, but also photography and making websites and of course he uses WordPress so Now imagine for a moment being in Norbert's shoes he He went from a secure job to unsecurity in his new Freelance occupation, but he has a wife and two kids He has two cars and a mortgage and he doesn't even know if and when he will be hired again And now he gets asked to take 2,500 euros out of his savings account his life savings his security buffer And to invest it into this logo design in his website Imagine how that conversation went with his wife that evening But Bjorn took this budget and he split it up in 1500 euros for the design part for the for the corporate identity Including the cost of printing stuff and everything which left a thousand euros to create a website And that brings me nicely to the subject of my talk. How can you do small WordPress projects? profitably well, I have Some pointers for you. I could talk about this all day But I have just some quick pointers for you, and then I'll be out of your way the number one thing is I believe a problem that all freelancers face regardless of their occupation and that is The things that happened before and after you do the thing you're really good at Getting projects lined up new projects lined up. That's a great a major problem often the sales part and then The second thing is what happens after is getting the money doing the invoicing doing the taxes doing the accounting So my my tip for you is this please please hire someone to do the accounting for you They'll probably take one or two hours a week max and it'll take you at least double and Then they'll take you out of your flow so That's an important Improvement the second one is be clear about your process Be clear up front to any prospects or customers the way you work Put it on your website put it in a PDF you email beforehand But make it really clear how you would like to work because if you do a small WordPress project It needs to be very very efficient and the customer needs to understand his or her role in this process so You could even do one or two review rounds Included in your in your process, but if you do then Make an email or something with a few bullet points of the improvements the customer wants to make and then have the customer email You back to confirm that if you do these five or ten things the customer will be satisfied that will Prevent things from keeping going over and over and over again adding more work to the project Third point is be clear on your pricing It's okay to have an hourly way hourly rate, but You could also do a few packages because you're clear about your process you can do like three packages and You can include for instance copywriting. Well, will your customer do the copywriting themselves or Will you hire a copyright a friend of yours who is also a freelancer that it makes a difference in price, of course Maybe will the customer provide the images the photos or will you use stock photos or will you hire a Friend of yours who is a photographer and send them over to the customer to make pictures It all depends on what the price is, but you must be extremely clear. What's in each package and Then you can have for instance three hourly rates one is your normal hourly rate for normal work that you can schedule at your own discretion the other one might be a Drop this drop everything now. This is an emergency hourly rate, which could be higher and Then you could also think about Selling a prepaid pack of like 10 hours at the discount the fourth point is Embrace the 80 20 rule You know getting 80% of the result with 20% of the time or effort and I know this is really hard for creative people because Creative people have a great difficulty accepting Something that's only 80% Good, you know they they would like everything to be just perfect and that's a trap because If you go down that path you will spend hours and hours and hours extra making it just a little bit better But it'll it'll be ours that you cannot bill or that will be outside of one of the packages you sold so Embrace the 80 20 rule number five is find the tools that allow you to work really fast because Your customer may have seen a website that's 10,000 maybe 15,000 euros and then they come to you and say I would like you to make this But my budget is a thousand euros Well in order to pull that off you need tools that allow you to make beautiful website really fast So research them and set them up and use the same ones all over all the time Second point a sixth point is save time with the setup. I Mean if you look at it What you're doing is you should look at it as like a production line or a process that you use over and over and over again and Such a process of course the outcome is unique every time But the process is the same so you can perfect the process and it starts all with the setup of the website And the tools you need so if you research some tools That you like then make sure you can set them up really quick and use them over and over again Seven point save time during the delivery of the website You know When you create a beautiful website with these all these tools and WordPress and WordPress admin and plugins and stuff Then when you hand over the website to the customer you also hand over the tools With the with the website, but that's where the problem starts because most customers. They don't understand these tools So it would be wise to select tools that your customer may understand that your customer can work with as well and then my final point is Try to upsell a maintenance plan That's a really good way to do small WordPress projects profitably You can have several maintenance plans like for instance you could do one for 29 euros a month where you say I will do Backups and updates once a month for 29 euros a month a Second one could be 49 euros where you say okay I'll do the backups and the updates and I also will be available for you for questions Again, that's being really clear up front of what's to be paid and what's included and what's not And then the third one may be for instance 89 euros a month where you say I do backups updates and one-hour work on your site on average per month These three plans you should offer as a monthly payment and Then if they pay up front for a year you can give them a discount Because you will save time on invoicing and stuff like that This will if you do this this will give you some continuity in your cash flow You will know upfront next month. I have so much revenue coming in anyway And as the more projects you do you build up this recurring revenue it also helps you plan the maintenance of the sites of the of multiple customers very efficiently and And most importantly you keep the relationship with your customer going you can try to upsell More and more services of your own for instance during holiday seasons or Christmas or special events And you can even sell them other people's services that you can take a cut from So to wrap things up. This is my talk and My name is Chris for me. I'm one of the founders of Swifty side Swifty side is a tool that helps with a lot of this stuff Making it easier for you and it's free and it's in the repository. Thank you