Websites That Cost Nothing & Baking Pies

Websites That Cost Nothing & Baking Pies

What do you do?

Part of what we do at Workshed is help our clients distill their value to potential customers into bite-sized chunks that are easily understood. It’s a lot easier to do for other people than it has been for our own business. In truth, we do a bunch of different things that are all intended to do one main thing – make you more money (not in the Ebenezer Scrooge sense, but in a healthy, sustainable sense). Communicating that succinctly has been challenging.

In nearly all of our initial meetings, the question of the cost comes up. While this is perfectly normal question, it’s not very helpful in making a decision about retaining our services. In reality, we perform our services and build websites that cost nothing. No, we don’t work for free, but the additional revenue and cost savings we create more than pays for what we charge.

Enter the analogy

Imagine the revenue of your business as a delicious pie (or a pie chart if you have no imagination). To explore the cost issue in this scenario, we’d essentially be asking you to give us a slice of pie. For some businesses, $5-10k might be a significant chunk of that pie, and with pie being so delicious, they don’t want to share. We understand your aversion to pie sharing in this situation…we are businesses owner too and have been asked to share our pie many times. That’s why we became bakers.A slice of pie

Rather than ask for a piece of your existing pie, we help you bake a bigger one. A pie large enough to give us a slice and still have more leftover than the pie you started with.Pie is like the sales of your business

We bake bigger pies

What’s our recipe? Simple, we focus on the result rather than just one or two ingredients like the flour or baking soda (which are not delicious on their own). We combine our ingredients (websites, design, photography, marketing, social media, video production) to bake a delicious pie for your customers.

Now you know what we do.  Anyone hungry?

Order a Pie

Day 21: Learn to code

Day 21: Learn to code

Computer code touches nearly every aspect of our modern lives.  Even if you don’t plan on making a living by writing it, it’s probably a good idea to at least have a basic understanding of what’s going on.  Heck, you might even enjoy it.

One [free] resource I’ve used is Code Academy.  They do a great job of breaking the lessons down into easily digestible chunks with exercises to help you understand what’s going on.

Code Academy Logo

Give it a try and let us know what you think.  You never know, maybe you have a talent for the binary?

 

Day 15: Your Website is Hurting Your Business

Day 15: Your Website is Hurting Your Business

Is your website costing you sales?

5 slides, 3 questions, 1 answer.
Now a presentation on SlideShare:

Your website is hurting your business

Ignorance is Voluntary Misfortune

Ignorance is Voluntary Misfortune

How to choose?

I collect quotes, so I anticipated selecting a single favorite might be more difficult than it turned out to be. In order to narrow the range of initial possibilities from my spreadsheet, I wanted to select a quote that applied to a broad range of circumstances. As soon as I set that one criteria in my mind…I knew immediately what my quote was.

Ignorance is voluntary misfortune.

Ignorance is voluntary misfortune.

Short and sweet.

Misfortune is defined as simply being bad luck,  and why should we suffer unnecessary misfortune as a result of self imposed ignorance?  This quote reminds us that through our own efforts to become more informed, we can avoid, or at least mitigate bad things from happening.

The implication is that we have a choice.  Ignorance or understanding.  Through education (not to be confused with schooling, but that’s another post) we can turn what may have been voluntary misfortune into opportunity.  Or, as Seneca the Younger put it:

Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.

This is my favorite quote because it reminds me of how important being informed is. Ignorance may be bliss for a while, but it can also end in misfortune.

What is your favorite quote?  Please share it in the comments.

Why did I get into this business?  Day 3 Hubspot Blog Fitness Challenge

Why did I get into this business? Day 3 Hubspot Blog Fitness Challenge

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
You may find yourself in another part of the world
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife
You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
-Once in a lifetime, Talking Heads

I had been in the homebuilding and remodeling business for nearly 20 years prior to taking over Workshed.  I had the wonderful opportunity to grow from a kid working as a laborer to the CEO (I use that term reluctantly) of a four million dollar a year business employing designers, project managers, carpenters and office staff.  We were pretty successful- winning awards while building a portfolio full of really cool projects.  We had a great reputation and a long list of happy clients.

craftsman home

One of the cool homes I built

Through this experience, I found that what I really loved was creating the processes that allowed my talented team to do what they do- design and build at a high level.  Putting a solid structure in place helped them work together seamlessly which resulted in happier employees, happier clients and smoother projects.

Then, as we all know, the market cratered.  There weren’t enough projects to keep my team busy so we had to let them go.  It sucked.  It really sucked.  All that hard work seemed to be for nothing.

I began to think about pursuing something new where I could apply my passion for process and working with creative folks.

Which brings us to Workshed.

Joe and I had wanted to work together for several years and were looking for the right fit.  When we heard that Workshed was available we were immediately intrigued.  Both of us believe passionately in building a strong local economy (which requires healthy local businesses) and love solving problems.  We felt that we understood the needs of the small businesses that Workshed serves and that we could have a positive impact- so we took the plunge.

Some people may wonder what a “construction guy” is doing with a website company.  Well, I’m not really a construction guy and Workshed isn’t just a website company.   My true passion is improving businesses and that is the mission of Workshed v2.0.  We aim to build a great company that helps other folks build great companies.  Building websites is one component of what we do to help businesses, but it’s an outcome of the process of solving a problem, not an end in itself.

My goal is to apply my hard-earned knowledge and skills to help my clients solve problems.  It’s what drives me to work at expanding my capabilities into new territories (like how to build an effective website that generates a positive ROI).  By working with the brave entrepreneurs who accept the risk of starting a business, I’ve found the perfect avenue for having a positive impact on my community and I’m helping to make the world a better place.

That’s why I got into this business.