Finding solutions for a small budget client who need a website

These days, my hometown is missing some of those small businesses that we had when I was a kid. My mom has always said that her favorite job was working in the women’s department at a family-run retail clothing store. My cousin ran a men’s store for years. Every Summer, my mom would take my brother and me to get new jeans.

Small businesses have a place in our local economies. No, I’m not talking about the small businesses that have 100 -500 employees, but the real small businesses with a dozen or so employees.

These are your plumbers, your barbers, your mechanics, your massage therapists, your AC repairmen, your farmers, etc.

They are self-employed which also makes them entrepreneurs.

Something has happened over the past 20 years with the business, you have to have an online presence. It is rarely negotiable anymore. Sure, there are some businesses that can get away without a website, but the time is coming and is already here where starting a new business means having an online presence.

What that means is that many of those small business owners come to us to fill those needs. The problem, however, is they rarely have the budget to use our services and often, they underestimate the cost of a fully functional website and social media presence.

So, what do we do? Do we send them down the road to find someone who does things cheaper? Do we customize a package for lower budget sites? Do we politely turn them away to fend for themselves?

When it comes to clients that don’t have the budget, there are complications. For one, some clients actually can afford it but they want the cheapest website possible. They don’t want to spend one cent more than they think they should have to. They will balk when you quote them a $5,000 price tag. Heck, they may balk at $2,000.

We know what we have to have to turn a profit and we know what have to charge per project. These kinds of people simply don’t value our services.

There are also the small business owners who really can’t afford our services. They aren’t trying to get things cheap, they just can’t afford them. In fact, they are probably not quite sure what things should cost.

Without our help, these folks will turn to either inexperienced designers, page builder platforms or inept cheap website developers. Not one of those scenarios is going to be good for their business.

Can we help them? Sure we can.

The question is always going to be, “who are the ones who legitimately want help and aren’t going to try to nickel and dime us all the way through the project?”

Small budget clients are not always bad clients, and sometimes the problems we have can be solved with better management.

Problems with cheap customers

• Don’t understand or see your value
• Often are more demanding
• Cause “bottlenecks” in the project

The trick is to recognize these things before you enter into some kind of business relationship with them. Naturally, people can become problems after the relationship begins after looking good before.

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So, I am proposing a few solutions for working with a low budget client which will allow you to feel good about working with a small business or a nonprofit organization.

Finding solutions for the low budget client

What is your purpose in doing business? Of course, the first answer might be to make a profit, and to be sure, a business without a profit is a business that seeks to exist. Nevertheless, we should be about helping businesses.

No doubt, there is a major distinction between a cheap customer and one who simply has too small of a budget. It is not always about being “serious” about their business when you simply don’t have the cash flow or budget.

Another scenario includes the market where you may be. What is affordable in one market may be too high in another market.

Many of us in the WordPress and website space are paying prices less than $50 per month for various SaaS products. What is the value of an Adobe Creative Suite or Gravity Forms? If you pay $50 per month, you are paying $600 per year for the use of the product. Adobe used to have a huge price tag for buying the product to use on your computer.

For more perspective, do you have the budget to hire a freelance writer or a social media marketer? These are considered important pieces of the online marketing puzzle, but the budget for these services when done well is not cheap.

Productize the service

One of the best things you can do to help lower budget clients is to systematize your process. Since they can’t afford more premium services, you have to turn projects quickly and efficiently. This means taking advantage of existing tools and services to help small business owners get a budget friendly website.

StudioPress has been selling premium themes for years with their Genesis Framework theme store. They then added the managed WordPress hosting using Synthesis. After that, StudioPress launched the Rainmaker platform which allows entrepreneurs to have a robust platform with all the necessary tools for a fully integrated online marketing website.

Most recently, StudioPress launched StudioPress websites. The company already has the hosting and the themes, so the next step was to productize it for a lower price. For as little as $24 per month, small businesses can a content based website on top of the Genesis framework and the StudioPress hosting.

This is a fantastic model and one that can easily be replicated for many designers. Basically, you have a one price type model similar to a Wix or Weebly.

WordPress Multisite

Using Multisite can be a great way to help small businesses get a website which they only use for a presence and don’t need to worry about updating.

A few years ago, this is what Restaurant Engine accomplished. Originally founded by Brian Casel, they set up a Multisite WordPress network, built customizable themes for restaurants, set up the backend, branded the dashboard, customized the language, and launched a successful software-as-a-service company.

This model could be an excellent alternative in a smaller setting like a town or neighborhood area. In fact, this would be fantastic for service based companies like plumbers, restaurants (of course), electricians, or HVAC.

You would control everything. You can charge a setup fee, give them a choice of a theme, install, configure and launch. Your clients can login to add content or you can do it for a fee. I particularly think this could be tied to a hyperlocal blog if you have one you may be running.

Build a Site in  Day

Adam Clark started a productized service a few years ago called WPtheory. The service completes a new website in one business day. This messaging is on the website,

What if your website could be live and bringing you business before dinner tonight?

wptheory does just that. We’ll customize your theme, configure your plugins, upload all of your content and launch your brand new website in a single day.

I reached out to Adam to see how the business is going. He explained there were some twists and turns in the road and took a job causing him to abandon the project shortly after starting. However, he said that it had worked pretty well and would be getting back to the business soon. He told me by email,

“I’ve done a handful of projects, most of them within that first three months of launching. With this kind of low-budget business, it’s all about eyeballs and volume. So the challenge for me is going to be figuring out how to generate traffic and provide value to those people so that they purchase the ‘service.’

To build this kind of project, you will want to make sure you have your system in place and tweak as needed.

Consulting

If you have in mind doing what is best for a company, you might consider some consulting. Consulting can be as simple as proving them with a good blog post on getting started with a WordPress website, referring them to a different solution, referring a small business to a lesser experience developer, or helping them put together their website in a Do it Yourself format.

Consulting can be as complex as you wish or as simple as you need. You might even point them in the direction of a page builder platform.

Conclusion

Not everyone is able to find various solutions for small businesses and other low budget organizations. You have to do business with those that will help sustain your business. In fact, I might even say that you need to have a solid foundation with your own livelihood before launching into something like these options.

I just happen to think there is an opportunity here with those who are well versed in WordPress development.

There will be some upfront cost and work, like any business, to get something like this launched. You will need to be experienced or have someone on your team that is experienced.