Growing our Nashville Web Design company was like other businesses. Figuring out where to start and how to make the jump from one to two was tricky. It was scary and seemed risky because there was some control being lost. But it was important if we would ever be able to properly serve the Nashville area. 

As I began working with larger businesses there would be questions about what would happen if I, the owner, wasn’t around. What would happen if I couldn’t be reached, was on vacation, or even passed away? If those were the questions how could I even miss a meeting? Did I even want to grow this Nashville web design company? If so, why?

There is a lot of advice out there on how to hire people and grow a business. Starting with why is one of the most important things to consider first. 

Personally, I knew we had a good product because clients kept coming back and the results were great. There was a big difference in our client’s businesses. Growing our Nashville web design company and helping more customers made a lot of sense. But there were a lot of areas where things would slip through the cracks. There were some lost sales due to no follow up, parts of the project were missed until the end due to lack of planning and record keeping, and more back and forth with things getting missed due to no extra quality assurance testing. And as more customers needed more maintenance and support the requests kept piling up. It quickly became full-time management and full-time development.

The why was clear. Serve more customers to grow more businesses, produce a higher-quality product efficiently, and gain some time freedom from doing everything. 

Now, how does one make the jump from one to two? 

The typical advice out there says to hire out the things you don’t like to do, create a vision, determine your core values to hire against, or get an assistant or project manager. As a technician working to turn into a business owner, most of this advice didn’t make sense to me. Hiring out what I didn’t like to do was expensive. And most of what I didn’t like to do was respond to client complaints, which I knew were my fault, to begin with. Creating a vision for myself seemed like a pie in the sky and a waste of time. There was work to be done. And how could I hire a project manager or an assistant who didn’t know what I knew? This seemed expensive, a potential waste of money, and hard to manage.

Clarity came for me with the idea of systems. Any of these methods could work with the proper systems in place. With a repeatable system in place, hiring and monitoring would be possible. Keeping some control while scaling up would be easier if the “how” was written down and someone wasn’t just given a task without my knowing how it was done. So, what systems do I create, and how does that translate into growth?

After much research and spending quite a bit of money, I came across a coaching group called 2X that presented a system called XDS. The idea was to write down everything you do throughout the month (broken down into weekly time), determine how long it takes to perform that task, decide whether or not you hate it, and if the work is administrative, technical, managerial, or executive on-the-business type work. XDS stands for cut, delegate, or system to create. The administrative work was the easiest to write systems for and the cheapest to hire out. With over ten hours per week being spent there, this was the obvious place to start.

Hiring someone good at any position can help grow an organization. A few, really obvious things were in my blind spot. Even though I had years of experience working with billion-dollar companies, the processes and tools to help execute those weren’t clear. Two changes we quickly made were to get out of email and to use a project management tool. We switched from email to FreshDesk so clients could still email us but we could keep track of it. Then we used a simple project management tool to keep up with tasks for our occasional freelancers.

With ten hours or so a week of extra free time to focus on sales and writing more code, we grew. As we landed larger projects and brought on more freelancers, it became clear that someone to manage these projects was the next hire. This was as scary as hiring the first person because more control would be released. But using systems, I was able to dictate how and when communication was done with clients, how much time was spent on certain tasks, and what the process for changes in the scope looked like. I was doing all of this work anyway but it wasn’t documented and it wasn’t being done consistently or at a high quality every time.

When we got to the point where we had an administrative assistant and a project manager humming along, we could take on more projects and do them at a higher level. We more than doubled in size. Of course, we had the occasional freelancer for some overflow development tasks and we were taking on any kind of work that we could get. I don’t remember if we hired another developer or quality assurance next but the process was mostly the same. What I do remember is that the XDS task worked wonders for us. Now, I have everyone on our management team do it and we consistently find ways to make us more productive and efficient.

Growing the business was not only important for me personally but it was a big benefit to our customers. The quality of work went up, our service was better, and we were able to serve more customers. Giving more customers the benefits and consulting from experience we’ve seen helps everyone. If you’re offering a quality service that people can benefit from and have the ability to scale to serve more customers then doing so offers a positive impact on your community.