$100K a year Web Design Business in 20 hours a Week as a Mom of 2! Katlyn’s story
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With her second child on the way and the company she worked for suddenly going out of business. Katlyn realized she needed a new job, and most importantly, one that would fit with her life as a soon to be Mom of two.
But becoming a web designer wasn't by any means, a get-rich-quick endeavor!
I’m so so excited to bring you Katlyn’s story today - it took her years of work, but these days she is doing exceptionally well.
Does she look familiar?! You might be thinkin’ back to a guest post from Katlyn a while back - all about referals - make sure to bookmark it to read next!
Oh and before we get going you are NOT going to want to miss this!
Ok y’all… back to today!
Her clients spend on average between $8,000 to $12,000 per web design project with her, and this past year she also crossed the exciting milestone of six figures (that’s $100,000!!) in revenue!
And most impressively, she managed all of this while working no more than 20 hours a week and having quality time daily with her two kids!
So without further ado, I'll let my past Square Secrets Business™ student, Katlyn of Katlyn Slocum Design, tell you her full story.
Oh, but first - take a peek at her gorgeous site! It’ll give you a clue to her niche that she talks about later on…
What was it that you were doing before you decided to become a website designer and what inspired the idea to become a website designer?
Necessity! I got my first big girl job at a marketing company in Vancouver, Washington, and that was going really well. My boss was amazing. He allowed me to work from home when I had my kids and my husband and I decided we wanted another kid.
So we got pregnant and the day I found out I was pregnant with my second son, the company went out of business.
I had worked there for a year and a half, was really comfortable, was making good money. So that came as a shock and I was like, holy cow… what am I going to do?!
My husband and I still needed both of our incomes to kind of make ends meet. So I started waitressing and then we had a family friend who owned an independent consulting firm, and he came back from a conference, he had an Amsterdam, and he's like,
“Hey, you know, they were talking about how we need to be active on social. Will you update my Wix website and do my social media for me?”
And I was like,
…I know nothing about web design… but yeah, I'll do your social.
And he is like, oh, you're young, you have a better eye for design - you'll figure it out! So he paid me hourly to work on his website and his social and things like that.
And he was actually the one who encouraged me to start a business. He's like, why don't you offer business services to people like me?
I was doing copywriting and proofreading and web design and social and stuff like that.
So I was like, yeah, okay. Why not?
So I started my business as a VA, offering all these different services, but I quickly realized I didn't like doing anything except for the website part.
I've always been creative. That was really fun for me. I loved exploring that. So I basically took the money he was paying me each month, It wasn't a ton, and I saved it up & invested in learning to be a web designer!
The first thing I invested in was Square Secrets Business™!
So you had this like imposter syndrome. You're like, I can do social media, but I don't know about websites. How did you end up on Squarespace & being a designer??
Yeah, I was like going to school for music and then I eventually got my business degree.
I had no background in website design, so he kind of just flung me into this WIX site that he had and I was just playing around with it.
And so when I actually decided to learn web design, Square Secrets Business™ was one of the first ones that came up and I was like, yes! This is up my alley, it was an affordable investment and it was something that I got a lot of value out of and I'm like, you know what?
If you can make a career just doing one platform that would be amazing - cuz trying to learn all of them was just like way overwhelming !
And so through Square Secrets Business™, I was playing around with Squarespace more and I was like, yeah, I actually like this!
And then around the same time I got on Fiverr and some of those freelancer sites and I did learn other platforms like Weebly and GoDaddy and Wix, and I was playing around with those, but I always came back to Squarespace. It just felt better!
So what happened next? How did you get your next actual paid client and like future clients after that?
Yeah, so most of it was actually just freelancing on Fiverr Not so much on Upwork, but I put my services for so cheap on Fiverr. It was like 200 bucks for like a big website and I was just dipping my feet in and like trying to build some experience and a portfolio, and just get more comfortable.
So I was on Fiverr for probably a year and a half to two years until I finally felt comfortable to kind of like go out on my own and charge what I wanted to charge and things like that. So I did dozens, probably 50 plus websites on Fiverr, and I feel like that got me to a place where I was a little bit more comfortable, like knowing who I wanted to work with, what platform I wanted to work on and stuff
But then I was sick of being a pixel pusher for these people only paying 150 bucks for a website or whatever. I was just done!
My next official client was a referral from the first guy I was working for to his son who was starting a plumbing business. So again, I did their site for super cheap.
It was another Wix website, so most of my next work was referrals.
We have a, close community, and a lot of people I know own businesses, so I just do little things here and there for them.
But it wasn't until. I came off of Fiverr and just decided like, hey, I'm gonna establish myself as a business in my local area in Vancouver, Washington that things started to take off!
I joined a networking group and it wasn't until then that I started feeling like I was getting legitimate clients at like a rate that I was happy with like $1800 to $2,200.
So yeah, it was just, kind of a progression!
Can you tell me about your main marketing strategy now?
My networking group and referrals is still really the way I get a lot of my business and past clients have referred me a good amount of business too!
I also, around the time that I was on Fiverr, I also invested in like a pretty like heavy-duty SEO program. And through that I learned how to create and rank websites on Google to be on the first page. So I basically just took the SEO education that I was getting and I was like, I'm gonna invest this into my website and try to show up at the top of the search results in my area!
So I was heavy, heavily doing offsite SEO for my website to show up. And so I'd get a lot of Google inquiries too in my local area.
But now, me and my family and I are planning for a cross-country move.
So I'm, this year I'm really focused on how I get myself out of my local area and get more of a broad reach!
So I got your Scale with Content Strategy Course. And so I've been working on blogging and social media and my focus right now is building an email list because when I move, like I can't just always rely on these Washington clients.
I'm gonna have to like get my name out there a little bit more. So podcasts and partnerships and things like that is kind of what I'm doing now!
Gettin’ on the bloggin’ train like Katlyn? Make sure to grab my FREE sure fire popular post content creation outlines
One of the interesting things about your business is that you have a very specific niche - tell us about that!
So, when I first started it was kind of just like, I'll help any business owner. But I remember in Square Secrets Business™ , niching was talked about.
I know a lot of people have a hard time with niching, but I think it was actually easy for me to niche. I grew up in a family where like all the guys in my family were business owners and all of them were in the trade.
My stepdad was a roofer. My dad and my grandpa were in HVAC. My other grandpa owned an auto repair shop. I'm from the, the Midwest, Minnesota and these types of people - the blue collar tradesman group of people is something I grew up with and I'm really comfortable with!
And also it helped because there's a very big need in that industry for marketing and web design and then on top of that I was following a lot of website designers who focus on female entrepreneurs or creatives. And so it was just all like feminine I just felt like it was this perfect fit where I'm like, I don't see a lot of people focusing where I'm focusing, these people need this and I'm comfortable with them!
So I niched into blue collar. So that was like plumbers, electricians etc. And then just recently , I focused in more narrowly because even blue-collar is such a large niche!
All those industries have very different pain points and needs so this year I've focused in on custom home builders and remodelers.
So I work with mostly men between their thirties and fifties in the construction space!
Peep Katlyn’s portfolio below for some of her recent projects…
A lot of people look at all the other website designers and they go like, urgh, it's oversaturated. There are way too many website designers! You've done this recently. Have you found that to be the case?
Firstly I just unfollowed a lot of designers cause I didn't wanna get in my own like head or like this imposter syndrome!
But even in my local area with the networking group that I'm a part of in just my area there are like five or six other designers that I've met with them personally and we trade business with each other - there’s enough to go around!
It's easy to feel like, oh, there are too many people, like no one's gonna hire me when they can hire this other person, but actually there's so much business to go around.
And what I do with the designers in my area is that - I'm a Squarespace designer for the construction industry, and I'm constantly sending referrals to local WordPress designers for example!
So when a client really needs a site, but Squarespace, or something else about the project isn’t a good fit (for example I don't like doing e-commerce, so I will refer to another web designer)
I'm just not in that space anymore where I feel like I wanna take on any, just any client!
I guess it can maybe be easy to think that it's oversaturated, but if you're just yourself you’ll find a space - clients get a choice of who they work with and it is based on your personality and what unique benefit you have for them!
Most of the time when I've even met with clients that are referred to me, they're not even interviewing a bunch of other designers so it's not like this race to like figure out who to work with.
Not getting referrals yet, and need to work on your marketing strategy?
So Katlyn, you have two kids, how old are they? And how has the website designer worked or not worked with having children?
I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old, and this year I was actually able to get them into halftime daycare three days a week for a couple hours a day.
But I didn't have that until this year, so me and my husband had a very unique schedule!
When I dove into this whole thing, I was like, you know, this is gonna take me like at least five years to build this to a place where we're like comfortable.
And so here I am near the five-year mark and it’s going really well.
My husband is an electrician and he leaves at 5:00 AM and comes home around 5:00 PM so when he comes home, we switch! I come into my office and from 5.30pm until to 7.30pm or so I work. Sometimes I'll work a bit during the day, but I really like just to be able to be home with my kids and leave my work hours for my work hours.
I work about three hours a day.
We've figured out a groove and how to make it work and it's been awesome for me because I can be at home with my kids and I work 20 or less hours a week.
And I feel like it's worked really well for us.
How many projects are you able to take on taking into consideration that you're working just 20 hours a week?
My normal was like two projects a month and they're like four-week designs. But I found that with my schedule, if I wanna have time for marketing and writing content and all that stuff, it's just like too much. So I really only take on one client a month now and then maybe a couple design days.
So you started off like we all do charging peanuts at the beginning! How much do clients pay to work with you now?
Right now I charge between $8,000 and $12,000 a project, and I would like that average to be like $15,000 to $20,000 per project. (Katlyn does 1 project a month and a couple of VIP days too)
I've just been stair-stepping my pricing and building on my experience and the value that I offer my clients little by little. And hopefully more in the future. In fact definitely more in the future!
So what exactly do you include in a project? Is that just a website? Is that a website and brand? Is there any SEO in that?
I am solely a web designer and how my process works, it's a four-week web design.
At the higher end of the cost, like let's say $12,000 to $15,000 projects are strategy-driven web designs. So when they come on I use content collection software and help walk them through all the content they're gonna need to, compile for their website.
They're sent a strategy questionnaire so I can really get to the heart and soul of what their specific business objectives are.
For example, do they want a higher conversion rate? Do they want more qualified leads? Do they want more traffic?
So we get into to the nitty-gritty of what they're actually looking for their website to do for them.
And we also hop on a one-and-a-half-hour strategy call to go over things like, the demographics of their ideal client. The goals they have for their business that they want the website to help them achieve? And we really deep dive into that.
I also install inspector tools like Hot Jar (a cool website user data collection tool if you’re not familiar) and things like that to gather data on how users are interacting on their website to get more data for the strategy call.
Then once we start the design process, often I design and develop the first two weeks, the third week we start revision, and then I do basic onsite SEO that I offer for all of my clients to get them set up for success on search engines!
Finally the fourth week is like wrapping up revisions and doing all the testing to make sure the site is mobile optimized, all the buttons are working and all that jazz!
For the handover I have a video training library on my site that the clients get a login to and they can go in and learn how to use their Squarespace site, and if they need specific trainings for their website I will make those for them separately - for example scheduling or e-commerce or whatever!
So it's a combination of strategy, web design, development, SEO, and training.
Like I feel like a lot of people think like, oh, for these projects, which are $10,000 plus, I need to be offering like seven other services in order to command that price but it’s not the case!
It’s less even about design or deliverables and a lot more about like what problem are you solving for the business.
If I'm working with a custom home builder and I built him a strategic site that he gets three more projects from a month. I have to think about how much more money did he just make a month from that!
So the investment makes sense! The value of it makes sense for them because they're getting that ROI (return on investment!).
We're problem-solving for them!
Tell me about like the progression of your prices - how long did it take you to go from $150 to $15,000?
That's a really good question!
I didn't start charging over $10,000 until literally one year ago.
The first two years was $150 to $500!. Then when I came off fiverr, and I established myself as a business and I think I increased my prices to $1,500. I was doing two-week websites, like 10 pages, so these big websites for like $1500.
And then I remembered what you said
“when I doubled my prices, I didn't see a difference in people working with me!”
And I didn't quite double it, but I think I went up to $2200 or like something like that and I thought that was a big deal!
But I was finding that at that price, I was getting so many inquiries and everyone was booking with me! And I was sitting in a restaurant one day looking at all the inquiries I had and knowing that every time I got on a sales call they would book.
And I know that doesn't sound like a bad problem to have, but I was just like - this is too much! I shouldn't be booking all of these clients!
I talked to somebody about it and they said “well, you probably need to raise your prices if you’re getting that many “yesses”
So a year ago, I hopped into another program that really focused on strategy-driven design, and I went to like a design summit and the title of her presentation was like, how to scale with $10,000 sites.
I was at this point in my business where I was already thinking about scaling and I was like, okay, I need to hire a team. But I was holding myself back because that just sounded so intimidating. I liked working one-on-one with my clients.
I didn't wanna hire people and pass projects off and juggle multiple projects at once. So this really appealed to me. I was like, oh, I could scale by offering more value and raising my prices. That sounds way better!
So going from charging $2,000 to $10,000 plus dollars, there must be some mindset work happening in there! Did you have any mindset blocks?
Yeah, well, I still struggle with that! I still have imposter syndrome. Like if it's been a couple months and I don't have a project, I'm like, oh, I need to lower my prices again! I can't do this!
And it's still, it's still hard because you think, okay, if I charge this much I'm gonna have to offer them so many more deliverables! Or it has to be like this 20-page site! But that just isn't the case!
I think the mindset thing really comes down to knowing what value you bring to your clients!
It can be easy for us as designers to be like,
“oh, I just design websites or whatever”
But no, people just can't do that!
They'll spend hours and weeks and months! I've talked to people who have a website in the works for like years that it just sits there and that's all this time and money that they’re missing out on! That they would've had that if they had their website done!
So what we bring to the table is a true service and a lot of value to our clients!
The biggest mindset shift is I think just knowing you're not gonna get everybody at those prices, and that has to be okay! The right people who understand the value of what you do and what you can offer and the problems that you can solve will come to you.
And I think the nice thing too is I don't have to worry about booking two projects every month and taking on 24 projects a year.
I could take on 6 high-end projects and make the same amount in a year!
So it changed my thinking - I know I don't need to land every single client, I just need like a few really good high-value clients to make my income goals.
So it's a constant work in progress, this mindset shift. But you gain more confidence and when you see your client's results and they're happy and you're moving mountains in their business it helps a lot!
What has changed in your life since making great income from home with kids? If you think about your life before when you were working in that job versus what it's like now, what’s changed?
Working less than half-time and I'm not sacrificing time with my kids.
Maybe my husband a little bit, coz we see each other less at night *laughs*
But I'm not sacrificing time with my family. I don't have to go work an eight-hour shift somewhere to make ends meet. I can work a coupla hours a night, be home with my kids all day andhave a creative outlet that brings me a lot of joy!
So that's been the biggest thing.
And we live well within our means. I still have student debt. I still have things that I have to pay off, but we're comfortable - I can put my kids in sports. We can go out to eat as a family and not have to worry about pinching pennies.
We can save a lot each month because we're making enough to do those things!
So there's just a lot of freedom and safety in just having the ability to just live life and enjoy things!
We take trips and whilst we don't take like a ton of trips, we can take a trip to the coast, go to the beach for a weekend, go out to eat with friends, take the kids to do things and not have to worry as much as I know some of my other friends do with their money.
So being able to do that, working less than 20 hours a week is a blessing.
You also hit a really big milestone in your business recently. You crossed a $100,000 in annual revenue! How does that feel? Did you expect it?
No! Coz I just upped my prices so dramatically, like a year ago.
So a year ago, I would've never thought that that would've happened!
I had mixed emotions about it to be honest! I was like, what is happening? Like is this real?
So it was exciting. But then on the other hand, I almost felt like a little insecure about it!
It’s a bit hard to explain - but in my community, money can be a touchy taboo subject.
And so I asked myself how to celebrate with certain people when it feels weird!
So I've watched to some of your videos about it and I'm like, is this just me like this?!
(You too? Make sure to watch this video where I chat about just that!)
But less so than like 50 years ago where it was just really taboo to talk about money. And the number of coaches that are putting it out there now and talking about it, means that it doesn't make me uncomfortable in the business world, but it's more like a personal life thing.
I'm wonder, who can I share this with and not like offend them or make them feel a certain way.
So it's been kind of hard to hit that milestone - I'm even getting emotional about it. It's a tricky space to navigate - there are certain people you share with and certain people you can't. which is difficult sometimes!
I have a lot of people who support me though so I don't wanna make it sound like I don't have people supporting me. I'm just uncomfortable talking about it!
Thinking back to yourself at the very beginning - are there any words of advice that you could give yourself now that you've been doing this for a few years?
I honestly wish I wouldn’t have raised my prices so slowly!
I spent too long to be on fiverr doing work for peanuts! So I wish I would've maybe accelerated that a little bit more.
But honestly, apart from that, no. I have found so much joy in this entire process and I've been really proud of what I've built!
It's been a lot. Hard work and tears and investment.
I have spent so much money just like trying to get this thing figured out, and I'm really thankful and blessed to find your programs (like Square Secrets™ and Square Secrets Business™) and some of the other programs I found that were not wastes of time, like they were so beneficial to my business.
My advice would be to do what I did!
If you can, outsource what you're not good at and never stop learning.
I continually am investing in my business and learning new things!
Just go for it and also know it'll take time!
I knew that a business would take five to 10 years to build. And now I’m here in my fifth year and I've made great progress but it's a lot of time and hard work, but it's achievable!
I don't wanna be that corny person that says if I can do it, you can do it. But seriously I had no background in web development, it was totally like just learning out of necessity - this is what we need to do to put food on the table and it's become fantastic!
For someone who's on the fence about taking one of the courses with me, what would you say? What would your advice to that person be?
A hundred percent take the course!
I don't know what your courses cost now, but I know for me I was like, oh man, like this is the most I've ever spent on anything. Now looking back of what I'm charging now, what I'm making, it's like peanuts and it set the foundation for my entire career!
I don't know where I would have been if I had not found Square Secrets Business™!
It taught me how to start a business, how to like set a timeline for projects, communicate with clients, all the things that I needed to get my business up and running!
So I would say a hundred percent, go for it and you will not regret it.
I've bought more of your courses after the fact! I went back and bought Square Secrets™ coz there are things I don't know about Squarespace still, that I wanted to learn!
I also have Scale with Content Strategy - I'm never disappointed by your content. So I would just say hundred, hundred percent get it!
Isn’t she amazing?!
One of the things that most hit home for me is that Katlyn wished she’d gotten off Fiverr and started charging her worth sooner…
If that sounds like you, make sure to watch the video below where I’m sharing exactly how to find your own web design clients as a new designer, so you never again need to work for peanuts on a freelancing platform!
