Incredible opportunity to own a 16 year old web development and marketing company that boasts a robust team and consistent monthly profits.
Watch the video below to learn a bit more about the owner and his business.
Tell us a little about yourself. What’s your background? How did you wind up starting this business? Have you been running it yourself for the entire 16 years or did you acquire it from someone else?
My name is Spencer Hill, 16 years ago I graduated high school and had a vision to develop a company that ran itself as much as possible, so I could fund and pursue the things I was passionate about. Today, I reached all the goals I had such as paying cash for land, a Tiny House, a car and seed funding a film production company.
How have you marketed your business? Where are your customers originating from?
After 16 years we generate a lot of word of mouth business and referrals, as well as organic leads from search engines. We’ve done very little advertising so that’s an untapped potential. Customers employ us all over the world, primarily in the US, with an occasional majority being Portland, Oregon based clients. But we virtually never need to meet clients face to face, so an owner operator in another location in the world would not be an issue.
You mention that this can be either passive or more aggressive. How much time does it take to run the business on average? Who else is needed on the team? Are there any automated aspects?
If I was kicking back, it’s an average of about 4 hours a week for me as the owner. Of course my staff put in many more hours than that though. If I was really pushing hard to grow the company you could easily fill 40 hours a week or more pursuing sales opportunities that exist within our own lead database, upselling or nurturing existing clients, reaching back out to former clients, not to mention improving our technical SEO and producing more content, including implementing the designs we have for the next version of the website and it’s key landing pages.
My Operations Manager is a huge asset, as is our Assistant. I have trained them to train others. So my current Operations Manager was, originally, my assistant. As I endowed my relevant knowledge and skills to her she was promoted and then because to teach our Assistant, who will eventually be qualified as another Operations Manager.
Our programming team and graphic designers are also essential.
All staff are contractors with flexible schedules.Many aspects of what we do are streamlined or automated. We have an advanced in house project management tool, finance tracking system, we rely on Zoho for Invoicing and other features. And collectively we’re aggressive about documenting in writing and video all aspects of the business operation.
What skills would someone need in order to continue operating the business in its current form?
The new owner should be fiscally responsible, have mid to high level management experience, enjoy strategizing growth (for our business and our clients business) and love people – staff and client side. It’s a very common sense driven business, you will be surrounded with people who have technical expertise (including myself for the first few months) to guide you and answer your questions so you feel primed and secure in your new venture.
If you were to keep running this business, what 2-3 opportunities would you focus on to continue growing?
I would focus on reaching out to our existing sales leads because it’s massive, high quality, free and can be done by the new owner or a sales person of their choice.
Then I would focus on building up the Google Ads and Facebook Ads client base because it’s recurring revenue. Website development business comes easiest from organic and existing clients, so little effort will be needed there to grow that.
Then I would focus on contacting all our existing clients and recent clients to nurture those relationships. There’s thousands in recurring and tens of thousands or more in one-time income there.The list goes on. Writing new content on the website. Doing a technical SEO audit of our website and applying those changes. Completing and launching the new version of the website that is currently in development and is cleaner, more focused, faster, etc… There’s so many opportunities.
