Integrating websites
Gwilym Cox | Blastoff websites
Blastoff is a spin-off brand created by Gwilym Cox of Joy Creative to market websites directly to the small business and startup web market. The brand positions itself to deliver expertly designed sites that are fresh and funky.
The concept behind Blastoff is to create a high-end professional base of website templates that are then customised for each customer to make it bespoke. As most of the work has been done in the template it takes less time to customise and therefore Blastoff can provide a much more affordable price.
This approach allows Blastoff to provide high-end design to help small companies and startups grow their brand online.
Working With 97
Gwilym is your typical graphic designer specialising in building the customer’s brand and developing their branding from concept to print. An Adobe Creative Cloud fan, he didn’t have the right tools to create websites.
Since being trained to use design2website Gwilym has built over 100 websites for his customers by simply incorporating the website sale into his branding consultation.
Gwilym had spikey cashflow and was finding it difficult to bring in enough work during the winter and summer holiday seasons.
Gwilym is now in a position where he starts off the month with a significant cash injection from his hosting fees. He gets paid whether he receives work or not.
Why Websites?
A website is a piece of design published on the Internet. Joy wanted to add websites into their business rather than pass the work on to other web developers. Joy found that each time they referred websites to a web developer the customer would then be referred on to a different graphic designer and would lose revenue because of it.
The solution needed to take account of the following:
- Add a new revenue source into the business
- Develop a revenue that is not seasonal and not linked to time
- Develop packages that aligned with the existing customer base to retain more of the revenue that would otherwise go to a competitor
The Results
97 provided the design2website training platform which allowed Joy to create a sub-brand called Blastoff to gain the necessary skills to build websites in-house.
Blastoff then utilised the 97 hosting platform to host their websites taking advantage of the fully managed support system. The focus changed to design rather than support.
Blastoff gained:
- Rapid implementation - Blastoff quickly learnt how to build websites and integrate it into their brand consultation
- Pricing that works - Blastoff was able to make a significant margin on the development of websites and build their cash cow
- Support - An essential requirement as design is their core business
Plugging The Leaks
“I found that I did all the hard work of getting the customer in the first place through networking, and when my customer needed something that I didn’t offer I would refer them to my networking colleagues only to find that they were subsequently referred onto my competitor. Say if I did some branding for them, I would then refer them on to a web developer only to find that they had passed them on to another graphic designer rather than pass them back to me.
The developers that I would work with would not redirect the customers that I had cultivated back to me, so the instant I would recommend a referral partner I would lose my customer.
Adding websites was part of a strategy to keep control of the customer. By building products where I had complete control I would be able to deliver what the customer wanted.” Gwilym Cox.
Advice for companies wanting to add websites as a service
“Adding websites has been the biggest game changer in my business. If you haven’t got a cash cow in your business then you need to add it as soon as possible. It does take time to build the cash cow, but it grew faster than I thought.
Being able to offer a suite of solutions to your customer such as design, print, web and hosting makes it easy to tailor a solution to any prospective customer that’s in front of you. What’s more important is having products that have different types of revenue behind it so that builds stability into your business. It used to be a complete nightmare around Christmas as all my work dried up and it would be a few months before my revenue would return to normal.
Website hosting revenue makes sure that my business is cashflow positive all the time, and it will do the same for you too.” Gwilym Cox.
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