Six Sneaky Places Web Design Businesses Leak Time and Money

Shannon Mattern: Welcome to the Profitable Web Designer, a podcast for web designers who want to work less and make more money. I'm your host Shannon Mattern, founder of the Web Designer Academy, where we've helped hundreds of web designers stop under charging, overworking and create profitable sustainable web design businesses.

Shannon Mattern: Hey there, welcome back to the Profitable Web Designer Podcast. And this week I have a really special episode for you. It is a replay of a presentation I recently did at the Women of Web Summit called The Six Sneaky Places that Web Design Businesses leak Time and Money. And it was such a well received and kind of transformational presentation for the women at that summit that I thought, oh, I need to like make this available on the podcast so that everyone who is a regular listener or if you're a new listener can hear about all the different places that your web design business might be leaking time and money and it might not be what you think. So I really hope that you enjoy this episode. And if after you listen you would like to talk to me more about how we can help you fix some of these issues in your web design business, please do not hesitate to book a zero pressure discovery call with me.

Shannon Mattern: I'd be more than happy to talk to you about your business and if it looks like I can help you, I'll share more information about what that could look like. So you can just go to https://webdesigneracademy.com and click on the book a call button and set up a time to talk to me. And I really hope that you enjoy this week's episode. Hey there, welcome to the Women of Web Summit. My name is Shannon Mad and I am so honored to be able to present to you today six ways your web design business might be leaking time and money and how to fix it. So I am the founder and c e o of the Web Designer Academy and we work with women web designers to help them stop undercharging and over-delivering so that they can create the freedom of flexibility and financial independence that they started their web design businesses for in the first place.

Shannon Mattern: And one of the things that we see over and over and over again with the thousands of web designers that we've talked to and worked with over the past seven years is that most women web designers massively undercharge and over deliver. They undervalue their skills and their expertise. They feel like they have to price their services based on what they think their clients can afford or how difficult or easy a project is, and it leaves them underearning, overworking and burnt out. But it doesn't have to be that way. You can make the shift from undercharging and overdelivering to high earning web designer just by being aware of the six places that web design businesses often leak time and money and how to fix it. So that's what I'm here to share with you in today's presentation. So if we're just meeting for the first time, just to give you a little bit of background about me, I started my freelance web design business as a side hustle back in 2014.

Shannon Mattern: I was working full-time at my corporate job and I had gotten a few clients just through word of mouth by telling people that I had built the website that my company used at my day job. And so people started saying, yeah, I need a web designer, I need help with that. How much do you charge? And I was like I don't know. Here's what I make an hour at my day job. I'll charge you that. And I got my first few clients and it was the like most challenging, difficult thing that I had ever done in my life. I did not think it was gonna be nearly as hard as it was to be a freelance web designer. And it wasn't that it was hard to actually build the websites. I didn't have these six things in place that I'm gonna talk to you about today in my business.

Shannon Mattern: And I was barely making any money. I was undercharging, I was over-delivering. And that is what I help our students in the web designer academy transform in their web design business because I went through it myself. I went through just working like crazy, not charging enough and not thinking that I could do it any differently. And I eventually got a lot of coaching and mentorship and invested in just learning so many different things to really help my business transform to profitable, sustainable, and healthy. And that's what we help our students inside of our programs do too. So today I'm gonna share with you those six key places that were really preventing me from having the time, money, and capacity that my web design business could have. So that if you have any of these gaps in your web design business today, that you are aware of them and that you can start to put the things in place that you need to put in place to fix them.

Shannon Mattern: So one of the first places that we see web design businesses leak time and money is what I like to call employee mindset. When I first started my freelance web design business, I was operating it like I was an employee and like my clients were my boss. And I don't know about you, but if you've ever had a corporate job, especially if you started one very early on like I did, you know, not a corporate job, but I got my first job as a teenager and you're taught that the customer is always right, you do certain things to make the customer client happy, you wanna make sure that you're a team player and helping your coworkers and you wanna keep your boss happy. And we do all of these things because if you're anything like me and how I grew up, because you know you're trying to prevent losing that job, you're trying to prevent losing that income, you're trying to prevent losing that livelihood.

Shannon Mattern: And we're conditioned that what it means to be a good employee is to keep the people around us happy and to perform at a really high level and to meet and exceed expectations and to overdeliver and to you know, do all of these things to excel as an employee so that we are rewarded with stability and safety and security and potentially promotions and accolades and all of these things. And so when I went into my web design business after, you know 20 years working as an employee, I transplanted that same mindset with me into how I worked with my clients and I, I treated my clients as if they were my boss. I let them dictate when communication was happening. I did everything I could to keep them happy because I was concerned about like the security of if my client is not happy, then I will lose them as a client.

Shannon Mattern: I will lose safety, I will lose security, I will lose money. And so therefore I need to keep my client happy at all costs. And that is a very, very, very hard way to run a business because you end up over delivering undercharging, you end up not setting boundaries, you end up letting your client dictate the entire relationship. And we'll talk more about how that can really harm your web design business when you're approaching your business like an employee mindset and what to do instead because it really does create the experience of overworking. If you could see across the top here that the time axis here, you end up overworking, you end up not making nearly enough money and you end up really burnt out and resentful. So we'll talk a little bit more about that and how to fix it in just a minute.

Shannon Mattern: The second way that we see web design businesses leak time and money is it's a cousin of the employee mindset, but it is people pleasing. And this one is really insidious because we want our clients to be happy, we want them to like us, we want the relationship to be really good. But what this ends up doing is having us say yes to things that we really shouldn't be saying yes to. And it also has us saying yes to things simply to avoid conflict because again, we don't want to have clients be upset with us or disappointed in us or frustrated with us because then if they are and they don't have a good experience with us, then we fear deep down that they won't refer us or that they'll say negative things about us online and that will cause harm to our business and to our reputation and to our ability to get clients in the future.

Shannon Mattern: So this is another place where we often see web design businesses leaking time and money when we're not, again, setting and holding boundaries. We're saying yes to scope creep, we're letting clients delay projects, we are doing extra revisions, we're doing things that weren't in the in the scope of the project. We are just allowing them to run the show. Not necessarily because we were conditioned to do that as an employee, but because it feels safer to say yes than to have the conflict of saying no. Or we, we fear that we're going to have a conflict if we say no. We fear negative consequences for saying no. So therefore we say yes to things that we don't really wanna say yes to, but we think we have to or it feels safer or more relieving to say yes to those things. And those things can really harm our web design business.

Shannon Mattern: Again, the very same way is that we are spending inordinate amounts of time doing work for our clients and we're not charging for it. So we have these feast and famine cycles we're we're getting upfront initial like project fees, but then we're spending so much time working on it and we're not asking them to pay us any more money because we're people pleasing and we want them to like us and we're worried about conflict and we're worried about what they're gonna think about us if we ask for more money that we end up doing a bunch of work not making any money and also not spending time to book another client because we're so maxed out. And this is a vicious cycle that perpetuates in our business until we learn how to not do this. Now I'm gonna talk about how to not do this in just a minute.

Shannon Mattern: Like steps you can take to stop people pleasing in your web design business in just a little bit. The next place that we see web design businesses leak time and money and capacity, right? Just like free. That freedom and flexibility to do the things is our own money mindset, projecting our own money mindset onto our clients. So what I mean by this is we talk a lot in the web designer academy about your pricing paradigm and at the end of this presentation I'm gonna give you a link where you can get your hands on a free training that breaks this down in detail. But we talk about how to market to like investment minded clients and how every client has a pricing paradigm that's either investment minded, hybrid minded or expense minded. And we teach our students how to speak and market to expense minded clients who see working with you as an investment that they're going to create a return on, not an expense, not money that's gone forever out of their pocket.

Shannon Mattern: And so how like we teach our students like how to charge higher prices and attract expense minded clients. So I'll give you a link to that training that goes in depth on that. But one of the places that we see web design businesses leak time and money is when we are projecting our own money mindset on to our clients. So for example, say I have an expense mindset where I am afraid to spend money because I feel like money is finite, that if it leaves my bank account it's never coming back like it's money gone forever and it feels very unsafe and risky for me to spend money. I'm always looking to spend the least amount possible when I'm making decisions in my business about like what programs, mentorship, training, tools I'm gonna buy. I'm trying to do everything on the cheap like cheaply as possible.

Shannon Mattern: I do things on my own, I'd rather spend my time than money. That's what we call in the web designer academy, an expense mindset. And so when we're operating our businesses from the pricing paradigm of it's unsafe to spend money because I don't know if I will ever make it again, we end up projecting that onto our clients. And so we think it's also unsafe for our clients to spend money. And so we keep our prices low because we feel like we're going to harm them by taking money from them because it's unsafe for them to spend money too. If we're projecting our own pricing paradigm onto them, we feel like it's unsafe for them to spend money too. And so we feel responsible for keeping prices quote unquote low, keeping ourselves affordable for our clients, not charging more, not charging our clients more because we have a fundamental belief that like spending money is harmful, right?

Shannon Mattern: And if you find yourself projecting your money mindset onto your own clients or if you're not sure that you're, if you do this or not, how you know is that you talk about being the affordable option. You worry about telling a client that something is going to cost more because you're afraid that that's gonna harm them. Or you intentionally just keep your prices low because you worry about taking money out of someone else's bank account that they could use to spend on something else, right? So if you worry a lot about money, you are going to worry about your client's money too. And we always tell our students like stay out of their wallets. You don't know what their financial situation is, it's really none of your business. And you get to empower your clients and show them what is possible for them when they part with their money to work with someone like you and how it's going to come back to them when they work with you to build a website for them.

Shannon Mattern: And like I said, I'll give you a link to a training that goes much more in depth on this, but if you're projecting your money mindset onto your clients and you're keeping your prices low because you feel like that is protecting them in some way, that's a huge opportunity for you in your business to really reframe your money mindset, to align your pricing with clients who are happy to pay you more and for you to stay outta other people's wallets and bank accounts and charge profitably and sustainably for yourself. And I'll talk a little bit more about that. So when you have a busted money mindset, you undercharge because you think you're harming your clients by charging sustainably and you end up making less money than you need to do life and run your business and you're overworking. So if you're web design business feels hard, this could be an opportunity for you.

Shannon Mattern: The other place, I think this is the fourth place we see web design businesses leak time and money is fear of a negative reputation. This is kind of another cousin to employee mindset and people pleasing, but we fear messing up, right? We fear a client being unhappy and leaving us a negative review or we fear that if we don't say yes to a client demand, they're gonna go into the Facebook group that they found us in or the networking group that they found us in and tell everybody that we're horrible and not to work with us. So when you are so protective of your reputation that you feel like you have to know everything ahead of time, that you have to be perfect, that your skills have to be on point, that you have to present yourself on your website in this perfect professional polished way that you have to have like the top-notch portfolio because if not people will find you out for the imposter that you are, that you think that you are for the fraud that you think that you are.

Shannon Mattern: You will overdeliver, you will undercharge, you'll overdeliver you will people please, you will do a lot of these things to protect your reputation because you're so afraid that you will never get another client if a client is unhappy with you. And so this is one of the places where we see web design businesses leak time and money because you're so, you have such a strong fear or worry that your reputation could be harmed or you have some imposter syndrome going on, that you work a lot more and a lot harder and say yes to things that you don't necessarily need to say yes to without asking for more money to protect your reputation. And so we help our students do, and I'll talk a little bit more about this, is like how do you delight your clients without overdelivering? How do you make sure that they get the best experience possible and that they feel empowered and listened to and heard and all of those things while you still don't overwork and overdeliver because we want you to like have a good reputation but it doesn't come from overworking and overdelivering and and being a yes woman and saying yes to everything.

Shannon Mattern: So the fifth place that we see web design businesses leak time and money is a lack of boundaries. And a lot of times we don't know that we needed a boundary until a boundary was crossed or maybe we didn't know that we were allowed to have a boundary because we've been conditioned to be an employee that says yes to everything. That's like you must be attached to your computer at all times and you must answer this email within this many minutes of it being received. Or we better not see your slack , you know, we better see you active on slack or teams or whatever that looks like for you to where you were taught that you don't have a lot of boundaries, that you must be a hundred percent available that you must say yes. A lot of the things that we've already been talking about, sometimes you don't know that it's okay to have boundaries.

Shannon Mattern: Sometimes you don't really have a solid process that has boundaries built in to help you. Sometimes you don't know that a boundary was needed until it was crossed. And so if you don't have clear boundaries in place align with how you want to run your business and live your life, it can be really, really challenging to communicate boundaries after the fact because we worry about all the other things that I've been talking about, not being liked, loss of our reputation, potential clients being upset with us, conflict, all of the things that who wants to run a business that feels like that. It just feels easier to say yes to everything. So when you have a lack of boundaries in your business, again, you end up working way more for way less money, right? And you start to get overwhelmed and burnt out in all of the things.

Shannon Mattern: And so that's a huge opportunity in almost every web designer's business that I've met, to put boundaries in place from the very first client interaction all the way through the project closing that empower not only the designer but the client to both be adults and make decisions every step of the way. The next place that we see opportunities to patch up holes, places where web design businesses leak time and money is yourself concept from I'm an order taker where the client dictates to me how everything happens and what they want and and all of the things to a collaborative consultant, we call this going from a pixel pusher to a collaborative consultant. And it really involves you stepping up into your authority and your expertise and your leadership and positioning yourself as the solution provider, as the person who knows what your client doesn't know, right?

Shannon Mattern: And this is such a big opportunity for so many web designers to really like take ownership of what you really know, right? Your client doesn't know what they don't know. They have a business that serves these type of clients. They have certain challenges, bottlenecks, opportunities, what you sell is a solution to their problems or a pathway to their goals. It's not a website. And so when you're positioning yourself as like, hey, whatever you want, I can build it for you. Or I'm selling this number of pages and whatever and you tell me what you want on it, you tell me what you want it to look like, all of those things when that's how you're positioning what you're doing, then you are just saying, okay, tell me what you want and I'll make it happen. When you shift your entire self concept from order taker to collaborative consultant, when you are like, tell me all about your business, tell me about your challenges, tell me about what your goals are, what's in the way of that?

Shannon Mattern: And then you put forth a solution and a path to what they really want. That positions that like shifts the power dynamic completely from you being the follower to you being the leader and to you being really valued and respected. Not that you're not valued and respected as the order taker, but it positions you as the one waiting on the client versus you being the one leading the client. So that's a huge opportunity for so many web designers to shift out of the order taker, pixel pusher into the collaborative consultant leader. And it really only takes a few tweaks to how you're marketing and running your, your web design business and the this final place or yeah, I think it's the sixth place is needing validation. So many of us, and I talk to so many web designers in our program who say, I spend so much time on designs and building because I just want the client to like it and I wanna knock it out of the park on the first shot and I the first draft, I want them to just fall in love with it and I wanna get the A and I wanna get the a hundred percent and I want them to love it.

Shannon Mattern: And it's because we're worried about many of the things that we talked about, them not liking it, them not thinking we're qualified, you know loss of reputation, all of these things. So we need the validation of the clients loving what we do. And part of that also ends up in overworking. We spend like way too much time thinking of extras to surprise and delight them that they didn't ask for overdelivering in many, many ways to get the validation of the client when what we really need to be doing is being able to ask for feedback in an empowering way and be able to receive feedback and be able to collaborate to get the client what they want. And so when validation is one of your driving forces for what you put forth to your clients, you can find yourself in this people pleasing stage where you just want them to like it so bad, meaning you just want them to like you so bad or like your work that you end up overworking and overdelivering and undercharging, and I touched on this a little bit, but being so passionate and so excited about what's possible for your client that you actually wanna give them more than what they're ready for.

Shannon Mattern: This is one of those really sneaky, tricky places that web designers get themselves in trouble because they get so excited about the client and their business and the possibilities and they see, they see the 30,000 view in the whole entire ecosystem of what the client could do. And they're like, you know, you could have a membership site and we can build you this and you have a speaking arm of your business and all the things and we wanna build them all of the bells and whistles all at once. And we end up like putting way too much stuff in our web design packages and projects because we get so excited about what's possible for the client that we end up over overdelivering, overworking and most likely undercharging. And this just comes from a place of like wanting to delight them so much and wanting to like give them everything they need, but it can actually like create more work for you and for the client.

Shannon Mattern: And so it can be, and it also comes when I say busted money mindset, it comes from like wanting them to get their money's worth also. And so you wanna charge like 10,000 for a website but you don't think you can unless you deliver all of this extra stuff. And so that is another place that we see web design businesses leak time and money and all of these things fall under the umbrella of over-delivering employee mindset, people pleasing, validation, your order taking, self-concept, passion, I know I'm missing one, let me go back through so I can remember them. Lack of boundaries, reputation, your money, mindset, all of those things really fall under the big umbrella of overdelivering and overdelivering can backfire on your business. And in a few really important ways, you become resentful of your clients. If you are resentful of your clients, if you feel like you're being taken advantage of, if you feel like you're not making nearly enough, if you dread seeing their name in your inbox, you might be overdelivering in one of those six areas.

Shannon Mattern: It manifests itself in different way for different people based on like their experience, right? If you're burnt out, if you are just working so much, if you can't go on vacation or get away for a weekend or even a whole day without opening up your laptop and you are just done and you're thinking about burning the whole thing down, that's probably because you're experiencing some one of those six key places where you might be over delivering opportunity cost. When we look at that graph and you see those places where you're spending all your time on client work and there's famine in your revenue, it's what you're missing out on, being able to put time into marketing and developing and growing your own business. When you spend time on your client's websites that they either didn't ask you to do or they're not paying you for, it's basically like you might as well be like taking out your wallet and handing them cash and paying for it themselves.

Shannon Mattern: And then you're actually also causing future harm to your web design business and you're creating more work for yourself and for your clients. So when you're resentful, overwhelmed, burnt out and you are missing out on growing your business so you're stressed because you're not making as much money and you're creating more work for yourself and for your clients, you are not at your best to serve the clients who deserve to have you at your best. Overdelivering is so harmful to you as a business owner and it harms your clients because you can't show up as your best self to them. They don't need you to be doing all of those other things for them. They need you to deliver the one thing that they really need and to deliver it well from a rested not burnt out, not resentful, not overwhelmed place. And so the shifts that we help our students make inside the web designer academy, yes we help them with packages, pricing, positioning, you know, marketing, sales, all of the things.

Shannon Mattern: But what it really comes down to and what drives whether you're going to implement the strategies or not or whether once you do get the clients, you're able to run the projects in a way that helps you actually like work less and make more money is how you're thinking about all of it. Your mindset around all of it. And that's what we want you to do. We want you to stop over delivering while still delighting your clients, while still loving your business, while loving everything that you're getting to do. We don't want you running your business from a burnt out place because why, why bother? Right? And if you've ever felt like why bother? This is too hard, you may be experiencing challenges in one of these places. So the first thing that we need to do is we need to just transform your self-concept.

Shannon Mattern: What you believe is possible about you and for you in your web design business, you are not just order taker. You know so much more than you think, you know, your knowledge is so valuable. And when you can shift your belief about what it is that you do for your clients and how it's not there to save them money, you're not there to save them money, you're there to help them make more money. You're not there to just build a five page website that looks amazing. You're there to build a five page website that looks amazing, that solves really important problems for them in their business and helps them reach really important goals.

Shannon Mattern: You are the one leading the project. And when you can transform your self concept to oh, I have to make them happy, save them money, make sure that they don't talk bad about me online and like just say yes to whatever they want so that like we can get this project done to, I'm here to show them what's possible and I'm here to lead them through this process and I'm here to give them options all along the way that work for me, that work for them so that we can keep this project on track. When I communicate to them that the extra things that they want cost extra money and let them make a choice on whether or not they wanna add that on or not. When I hold them as high and capable and responsible and I don't feel like I'm responsible for them, the whole dynamic of the project completely changes and you don't feel so compelled to overwork all the time.

Shannon Mattern: You, you are running the show and you have the freedom and flexibility that you want. So transforming your own self-concept first is critical. And I'm gonna give you a link to a training that's gonna get you started with that, at least with your pricing and how you value what you do here in just a minute. Another huge opportunity for you if you find yourself in any of these places is just truly letting go of needing to control what other people think of you. A lot of our people pleasing a lot of our employee mindset stuff, A lot of our need for validation or wanting to control our reputation comes from the thought that if someone says something negative about me to someone else or online, that is going to harm me personally and professionally. And so therefore I need to do whatever I can at all costs to prevent that from happening.

Shannon Mattern: And when you know that every decision you make is coming from a place of integrity, when you have a process for making decisions from a place that isn't just self-serving, but is taking into consideration your client and their needs and truly coming at every client interaction with, you know, here's, I have thoughtfully and in integrity thought about what is good for me as the designer and what is good for you as a client and I'm also giving you options so that you can make an empowering choice and never disempowering you or making you feel powerless. That's a totally different dynamic than I'm gonna do what you want so that you like me. You can show up in integrity, you can show up with thoughtful respect and you can let clients make their own decisions. When you can do that, you shift from it needing them to like you to feel safe to being like, I feel safe because I can trust myself and I'm in integrity and it's a totally different way of operating a business.

Shannon Mattern: So that's what we help our clients do is really like get to the heart of when they feel compelled to say yes to something that they really don't wanna say yes to. What's really underneath? What is the thought driving that desire to say yes? And then we address that, right? We address that thing and help them get some empowerment around solving the real what's at the root and the core of wanting to say yes to things that they don't really wanna say yes to. Working on your money mindset is one of the most powerful things that you can do to stop overdelivering and undercharging. So I'm gonna give you a link to free training https://webdesigneracademy.com/pricing. You'll learn all about the pricing paradigms and what it looks like to like, how to figure out which one you are and how to shift into one that's more empowering for you.

Shannon Mattern: That doesn't position you as like, oh, I have to save my clients' money, I have to protect them like it's harmful for them to spend money with you and really shift your whole paradigm to, oh, when they work with someone like me who caress as much as I do about them, it's all about helping them make more money and I can help them make more money when I am making enough money, right? , when my business is healthy, when I'm charging profitably and sustainably, when I'm not maxed out, when I'm not overworking, when I'm not operating from so much stress and I have more creative clear ideas and can create better solutions. Working on your money mindset is one of the huge opportunities for fixing these things. And then really learning how to set mutually empowering boundaries from the first interaction boundaries are not to put up a wall with barbed wire around you so that no one can come in and harm you.

Shannon Mattern: Boundaries are about saying, here are the ground rules and if you don't follow the rules, here is what I will or won't do. And communicating that and then letting the person choose. Like do I want to follow the rule or not follow the rule if I follow? Like it's a choose your own adventure, right? If I follow the rule, turn to page 37, . If I don't follow the rule, turn to page 57 and here are the outcomes. And it's really about just taking the emotion out of that and neutralizing it, taking the conflict out of it. And really, anytime you know, a client wants to delay a project or add something on or whatever, knowing how to say and to calm your inner people pleaser and say, yes, I'd love to do that for you, here are some options. Giving the client options that work for you and letting them have a choice, right?

Shannon Mattern: So learning the skill of setting boundaries can plug up so many holes in the time, the so many leaks of time and money in your business. It's crazy how much money you can make by holding boundaries and without even having to raise your prices. Learning how to receive feedback, right? And not take it personally and not make it mean that you're not good enough and not make it mean that you're imposter and not make it mean that you're a fraud. When you put forth a design and a client doesn't like something or expected something different, all that means is that we had a gap in our communication and now, and we're closing it now. And some people communicate visually, some people communicate verbally, some people communicate audibly like the hearing conversations. And so if you can understand that feedback isn't about you as a person, it's just about we had a gap in our communication and there was an unmet expectation and now I'm learning that and now I get to give some options for fixing that.

Shannon Mattern: You put so much less pressure on yourself to have it perfect and right from the get go. And when you can explain to clients like, here's my process for how we are gonna make sure you get everything that you want. And here's how I'm gonna ask you for feedback along the way. When you set the expectation for that upfront, you take all the pressure off of yourself for having to be perfect. And so if you can learn how to set the expectation to receive feedback and then how to receive it, that is going to keep you from spending hours overworking before delivering a design just to get the validation of the A or the client loving it. And then again, like I said earlier, notice your urges to over deliver. If there's one thing I want you to take away from this, whatever you have an urge to over deliver or to say yes to something you want or to not charge for something or whatever, notice what you are thinking in that moment.

Shannon Mattern: Are you thinking, I'm afraid they'll be mad at me. I'm worried about, I don't wanna have that conversation with them. I'm scared that they won't like me. Notice all of those things. 'cause That's where your real work is. It's not in going to find another script for how to say this to them or taking another course or whatever it's truly about. Now that I know why I have this urge to overdeliver, do I wanna continue to believe that this is true? You know? And how do I change my thoughts about this so that I can implement a new strategy and get a different result? So that is the core of the work that we do in the Web Designer Academy. We call it mind trash makeovers. We figure out what is in your way, what are you thinking that's in your way of creating the results that you really want?

Shannon Mattern: Is it mindset? Is it mechanics? Is it strategy? Is it math? And nine times outta 10 it's mindset because y'all are super smart and you know how, you know the strategy and the mechanics of a lot of things. The thing that's holding you back is like the thoughts that you have about doing the thing. So notice those. Just start to pay attention because that's where the real work is, that there's gold in the mine trash, I promise you. So notice that because it is time for you to stop undercharging and over delivering. You don't have to. You do not have to undercharge an overdelivery. You do not have to. You get to delight your clients without undercharging and over delivering the experience of working with someone who is just so spacious and calm and confident in what they're doing. That doesn't come from you learning more skills.

Shannon Mattern: It comes from you cleaning up the rest of this stuff. You get to do that. And so I wanna help you do that, starting with our free profitable pricing framework training. We're gonna dive a lot deeper into the mindset piece of stuff and money mindset and all of that. So you can get that at https://webdesigneracademy.com slash pricing. You're gonna learn how much you really can charge for web design. The key shift to make to your pricing that will unlock your revenue potential are rule of 10 for setting profitable, sustainable pricing. We'll talk about making over all the mind trash that you have about why you can't charge that much. We'll give you a detailed breakdown of our profitable pricing framework training and share with you our seven step process for creating a profitable, sustainable web design business. So you can get that at https://webdesigneracademy.com slash pricing. And thank you so much for listening to this presentation.

Shannon Mattern: You absolutely can shift those six places that we see web design businesses break down by just noticing whether or not those things are causing you challenges. And really just awareness is truly the first step. When you can notice what you're thinking and then decide whether or not that is serving you and you, whether or not you wanna keep believing it, and you can just start to deconstruct and let go some of those beliefs that have you being a people pleaser and keeping you, letting all your clients be your boss and all of the things that really hold us back. Your web design business will completely change just like minded, just like the hundreds of women that we've worked with inside of the Web Designer Academy like their businesses have. So I would love to hear from you. I would love to connect with you. You can find me on Instagram at @ProfitableWebDesigner.

Shannon Mattern: We have a Profitable Web Designer podcast. Both hosts of the Women of Web Summit have been guests on that show. So you can get that at https://webdesigneracademy.com/podcast. You could get that pricing training again at https://webdesigneracademy.com/pricing. And to learn more about what we do, how we help women, web designers package price, position, and sell profitable web design projects and clean up all of the things that we talked about today. You can just learn more about us https://webdesigneracademy.com. It has been so fun to be with you here today and I look forward to connecting with you. Bye. If you are ready to finally stop undercharging and over-delivering, if you're ready to take back control of your time and book more high paying clients you love and make more money as a web designer than you ever thought possible, then book a zero pressure discovery call with me today.

Shannon Mattern: All you gotta do is go to https://webdesigneracademy.com/call, choose one of the available time slots, fill out the intake form, and we'll meet on Zoom to talk about your goals and what's really in the way of you reaching them. And if it looks like I can help you inside the Web Designer Academy, we can talk more about what that looks like. It is super chill. There's zero obligation to say yes to working with us. If you book a call with me, it is simply a chance for you to learn more about how we can specifically help you, you personally, with your unique skills, personality, and experience to create a highly profitable, sustainable web design business and create the freedom, flexibility, financial independence, and fulfillment that you started this business for in the first place. So just go to https://webdesigneracademy.com/call and I can't wait to talk to you more about your web design business.

Speaker 2: This podcast is part of the sound advice FM network. Sound advice FM Women's Voices amplified.