“The kinds of clients that I want to appeal to have changed because I've got so much more confidence in the products that I produce and the way that I handle my customers.”
My name's Cat. I run a small web design agency in Sydney's inner-west out of a co-working space. I'm a web designer, a WordPress groupie and a WordPress website trainer.
How Was Business Before Agency Mavericks?
It was a bit all over the place. I didn't have any structure; I didn't have a workflow in place at all; I didn't know when I was next going to get paid; I didn't know how to ask people for money; I didn't know how to communicate what I was going to help them with; I didn't even know half the stuff I was going to do to make their website more valuable than another person's website; and I guess I was still learning the ropes about how to be in business, as well as learning how to make websites.
It was a very scattered little existence – very much just a freelance lifestyle as people expect it to be.
How Did You First Discover Agency Mavericks?
Troy kept sending these messages, these emails saying, “Hey Cat,” and I was like, ‘this is bloody automated bullshit' and so I started sending emails out to “Dear Automated Troy, I have some questions for you…”, and he would write back. So I thought, ‘this is kind of funny', but I also appreciated that there was a person behind this big push.
Why Did You Join Agency Mavericks?
I've always been more involved in things when there's a kind of community push behind it, and I guess I just trusted the team behind it already and had good experiences with the people that they've been working with. So it came around at the right time and I kind of went to myself, ‘Well I need two more big jobs' – at the time it was ‘two more big jobs to pay for this for a year'. Now that's like a quarter of one job, but at the time, I went, ‘Okay well I'm just going to commit to it for six months, see how we go'. It had a guarantee on the first thirty days or something like that, and I think I inhaled the first thirty days and was a bit hooked by then!
How's Business Since Agency Mavericks?
It's all a bit different now. My life has changed a little bit as well, but I think the mere fact that I consider myself ‘in the business' as opposed to a freelancer is huge. My clients have changed. The kinds of clients that I want to appeal to have changed because I've got so much more confidence in the product that I produce and the way that I handle my customers. I've now got so many more recurring customers. People I do work for come back to me to do more work, so that's a pretty good indication that you're doing an okay thing!
Why Should People Join Agency Mavericks?
I had a big problem, a good problem to have, but I was having a problem delivering all the work that was coming in. I was able to just reach out to everyone and get not just good ideas, but encouragement and support and people checking in with you and seeing how you're going and offering things. I've made all these great friends around the world and people who I genuinely feel that I can call up, as it turns out, at any time of the day because it's an international program. I've got all these people on Skype, who I can just ping and say, “Hey, I like that thing that you did on that other website, how did you do that?”
It's such an approachable community and it's always motivating you; there's always someone coming down and someone going up, and you feel that it's good to be able to help people, it's also good to be lifted up when you need a little bit of a kick in the bum or some general help, and I think that's the thing that I've gotten out of the program this year – just the community aspect of it has been phenomenal.
