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About the Book

Are You Losing Sleep Over the Financial Situation in Your Web Agency Business?

It’s that time of the month again: making payroll. Just like so many months before this one, you have no idea where exactly is your next paycheck coming from. As a website development business owner, you are already doing your best to land new clients, collect payments from past projects and finish due work so that you and your employees could get paid. If only you could carve out enough free time to work on growing your business. If only your creative work did not suffer under the heavy burden of worrying so much. If only you had enough leads coming in. If only your clients paid you on time. If only there was a way to get this business under your complete control. If only.

Recurring revenue is an elegant solution to many a business trouble.

To a creative services company, recurring revenue is the holy grail. Imagine money appearing in your company bank account every month or every year without perpetual worry and constant struggle. Imagine not having to depend on money coming from new projects. Imagine spending your work days doing your most creative work for awesome, well-paying clients who love everything you do for them. Imagine watching some of your toughest business problems fade away.

If recurring revenue is so awesome, how come so many web agencies don’t have any?

Recurring revenue is not built automagically, but you can do it and this book will show why, what and how exactly.

It’s you, the web agency owner, who needs to carefully plan, build, implement, sell and market your recurring revenue services. Fear and lack of resources, time, energy, experience and know-how is what keeps most web agencies from creating their own recurring revenue streams. Web agency owners aren’t usually aware of which of their problems are easily solved with recurring revenue and because of that lack of awareness, they choose not to act.

Luckily, there's this book - a complete guide to making you aware of the benefits of recurring revenue. This awareness will help you master the subject and the book's many fresh ideas will infuse you with self-confidence which you need to start the transformation. The book’s many practical examples, resources and tips will help you build and sell your services.

The author of this book, owner of a web agency herself, had to walk her own twelve-year long path toward profitability. This book is the missing manual that the author wishes existed at the time when she co-founded her agency in 2002. It took her years of trial, error, tears and sweat to realize that recurring revenue was the solution to so many of her agency’s struggles. And after she finally made a decision to focus on building recurring revenue, it took her another twelve months to build all the necessary services and resources to the point where she could start selling them. Six months after that, her agency’s annual recurring revenue increased 35%. Today, her agency’s monthly business expenses are almost fully financed by some form of recurring revenue. The author has distilled her experience into this book so that you could skip years of indecision and months of work, trial and error.

YES! is the answer to all your questions below:

• Will you explain what exactly am I losing out on by not having any recurring revenue in my agency?
• Will I read about the types of services which are good candidates for recurring revenue?
• Will you tell me which recurring revenue streams are bad for my web agency so that I could avoid them?
• Will I learn exactly how to price my recurring revenue services?
• Will you help me avoid common pitfalls which people make when they first try to build their recurring revenue streams?
• Will you teach me how to sell my services?
• Will I find out how to sell recurring revenue services to my regular customers and what exactly do I say to them?
• Will you help me write a description of my services?
• Will you show me specific examples of what to put in my service contract?
• Will you teach me how to organize my business around recurring revenue services so that I could build a sustainable web agency?
• Will this book save me tremendous amounts of time, money and energy and guide me in the right direction?

If the book fails to answer any of your burning questions, the author will be delighted to hear from you. Just contact her and she will answer by writing new book chapters which address your concerns. That’s the beauty of a Leanpub book: you, the reader, get to decide on the contents of the book.

This book is focused on teaching you how to build services, not products.

Unlike so many blog posts that you can find online for free, this book will not try to persuade you to abandon your agency business in favor of building products. It won’t tell you to write books or build apps. In fact, the book builds a strong case why you should not start a product business with zero recurring revenue. If you want to stay in the web agency business, this book is for you. If you wanted to build products, you’d become a product company, right? Having said that, the book does nudge you to productize your services and make them scale better.

Will this book solve all your business problems?

No, it will not. But, as you’ll learn by reading the book, recurring revenue is the second most important of the five pillars on which a profitable web agency builds its foundations. The first pillar is to charge what you’re worth, but this is a topic for another book. Your challenges weren’t created overnight and they will not go away overnight. With recurring revenue, however, everything good that should happen for you, happens faster and with far less struggle. This has been the experience of the author of this book and you are now invited to use her experience to your agency's advantage.

About the Author

Visnja Zeljeznjak

@simpfinity

In 2002 Visnja Zeljeznjak co-founded logIT (www.logit.net), a web agency in Croatia, EU. In the past twelve years, Visnja has played every imaginable role in her agency, except that of a designer or a programmer. She’s been a sales geek, sales manager, project manager, Internet marketer, consultant, web architect and recruiter. But first and foremost, she’s a writer with a special kink for sales.

Because she’s always been in charge of sales in her company, Visnja personally implemented or participated in implementing all of the recurring revenue types that this book deals with. She has personal experience in building recurring revenue, selling it, promoting it and organizing the delivery of services to clients.

As a sales geek and a sales manager in her web agency, Visnja personally talked to thousands of clients, wrote thousands of website sales proposals and sold hundreds of websites herself. Her personal record in how long it takes to sell a complete website is 45 seconds. She’s been known for preaching the #ChargeMore religion wherever and whenever opportunity presents itself.

Visnja has spoken at Croatia's leading web conferences on numerous occasions. Conference attendees chose her among the top five speakers many times and this got her a fancyish title of one of the leading Croatian web strategists.

In 2003 Visnja graduated from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Croatia where she acquired her degrees in information sciences and German language and literature.

Today, Visnja’s agency is one of the best known and the most experienced website development and Internet marketing consultancies in Croatia. Visnja is now in charge of logIT's product division which is busy building Simpfinity (www.simpfinity.com), an all-in-one sales proposal + project management + helpdesk software for web development companies. By writing for Simpfinity, Visnja is sharing her extensive experience and knowledge in hope of sparking a louder conversation about the business of website development.

Visnja is happiest when she writes, plays with landing pages and sees her work touch people's lives in effective ways. You can tweet her @simpfinity, Google+ her, connect with her on Linkedin or read her personal blog where she writes about writing, running a web agency business, the business of software, sales and digital marketing. In her personal life, Visnja enjoys science, science fiction, cats, vegan food and good wine. She proudly calls herself a happy person.