The Boss of You

With options that vary as widely as choosing between having your boyfriend’s roommate build you a website in exchange for making him dinners for a week, or paying a professional studio like ours to design your website (let’s put our cards on the table here and I’ll let you know that typically our budgets start at $10,000), it can seem like trying to figure out what a website actually costs (3 bags of groceries vs. $10,000?) these days is pretty much impossible. Lucky fo r you, we’re not only business book authors but also website designers and as the head sales girl at Raised Eyebrow — meaning I’m the one who most often answers this question by email/phone/in the elevator — I’m going to tackle this question along with some more detailed pieces like how to get yourself a cheap(er) website without relying on the timeline of your boyfriend’s roommate in this and subsequent posts.

One of the factors that makes pricing a website tricky is that really (and forgive me for getting a bit esoteric here) websites themselves don’t really cost anything. At all. Unless you need to pay for some software licensing for things like a shopping cart or a Content Management System (CMS) or some other groovy widget on your site, there are really not any hard costs involved in designing a website. What you’re actually paying for when you get a website is the time an expertise of your website designer (or boyfriend’s roommate as the case may be) and that time and expertise is always going to vary in how it is priced.

In our case, when we get hired to design a website, our clients are hiring us to engage in a fairly formal and detailed process. A process that involves all kinds of documentation, meetings, research and strategic consulting in addition to the more tangible deliverables like design options (we typically put together more than one design option for a client to choose from), design revisions (typically anywhere from 2 to 4 rounds of revisions), and of course eventually all the code that comprises the final website in question. In terms of hours, our projects typically clock in somewhere around the 80 hours plus mark (some are in fact WAY higher and well into the hundreds). And, of course we need to charge for that time. We also charge according to our expertise level, which is at this point to be fair pretty darned high given how many years we and our staff have been in this field. Add to that the fact that we need to recoup our own hard costs (things like rent, computers, phones, internet and all the things that Lauren so masterfully explained in Chapter 3, the Finances Chapter, in our book) and you get to $10,000 websites pretty quickly.

That said, not everyone needs a $10,000 website. In fact, I’m going to venture that most of you reading this blog don’t. So what do you do? And what should a website cost you? Of course it depends on what your website is going to do, and getting clear on all of this before you go out asking for quotes is a great way to get a more accurate quote out of your website designer to be. Here’s a partial list of questions to ask yourself with regards to the kinds of functionality a website may have to guide you:

• Is your website just going to be a basic online listing that includes a description of your services/products, a bit about your company and how to contact you?
• Will you website actually sell products? If so, in how many different currencies will you sell? How many products do you have to sell?
• How often are you going to want to update your website? And do you want to do that yourself, or do you have the budget to hire someone on an ongoing basis to help with that?
• Do you need/want a photo gallery? If so, how many images will be in that gallery?
• Do you want your website to include a blog?
• Do you need a calendar for events/happenings? If so, how often will that calendar change?

Websites that include e-commerce are as a general rule more expensive than ones that don’t. That said, there are lots of great services out there you can use to get e-commerce up and running on the web on the cheaper end of things. We mentioned Shopify and Etsy in the book and I’ll write another post on e-commerce here next week along with one on how you can get your very own website without breaking the bank. So stay tuned!

(Notice how I avoided answering what a website actually does cost? Smooth huh. Really, I’ve got no hard answer to that. But this article from a few years back at Entrepreneur.com I think does a pretty good job of setting some reasonable benchmarks).

We do! And we especially love Cupcakes Take the Cake, an all-cupcakes-all-the-time blog co-authored by Rachel Kramer Bussel, Nichelle Stephens (who by the way has a great business blog of her own), and Allison Bojarski. We’ve known Rachel for years, from back in our Soapboxgirls day (and before she became a hugely famous writer), so we were delighted when she asked to interview us. Herewith, our answers to Rachel’s questions about our book, running a bakery (or other food-based business), and what we love most about cupcakes.

I received an email a couple of weeks ago from a woman I attended university with, years and years ago. Although we still know people in common, we hadn’t stayed in touch really, until she emailed me to tell me she was setting up her own PR company and had wandered into the bookstore’s entrepreneurship section only to find just the book she was looking for… with my face on the back cover!

Liz is a publicist in the performing arts sector (we both studied classical music at the University of British Columbia), and with several solid years of experience under her belt she’s feeling like it’s time to go solo. I’m really excited for her and think she’s ideally suited to the entrepreneurial life; she’s smart, ambitious, and has that “fire in the belly” that’s common to all of us who want to be our own bosses. So when she wrote this review of our book on Amazon, it meant a great deal to me.

Congratulations to Emira and Lauren for writing this excellent book. I am half way through, and reading it seriously: I am reading a couple of chapters at night, and going back and answering the questions by day in writing. I plan on starting my own PR business, and this book has become a bit of a “manifesto” for me. What I love most is the basic, practical advice it offers, along with the encouragement. It’s positive and reassuring, yet direct about the pitfalls of making mistakes with your business.

Next, I love the feminist subtext of this book: that us women deserve to be paid what we’re worth, and I loved the urge (“We beg of you, close the wage gap between men and women!”) to price ourselves appropriately, and not modestly.

“The Boss of You” is hitting me on a few levels, inspires me, and is giving me courage to get my ducks in a row for the eventual launch day (still a ways off - but definitely in the works).

I really hope the Oprah producers come across this book and get these two rockin’ chicks on the Oprah show. Talk about “living your true life” - and earning a living while doing so - !

When meeting a graphic designer to work on my logo, she kept grabbing the book and flipping through it and said, “okay. I really have to get this.”

I encourage anyone (men, too) who has a dream of starting a business to get this book. My only wish is that it was edited to remain Canadian with American references (instead of the reverse) but who’s quibbling?

GET THE BOOK, PEOPLE.

Cheers,
Liz Parker
Publicist

(Thanks, Liz, for saying such nice things about our book — and for granting me permission to re-post this here.)

How excited are we to be guests at The Lab at Velocity Art and Design in Seattle next week? Very, very excited.

I mean, for starters, I fell in love with their website ages ago, and they carry just about everything Roost makes, and I suspect I may come home with an item or two for my apartment because everything in the store is drool-worthy.

But the owners are also people after my own heart, what with their hosting of monthly business/inspiration/networking events for designers they call “The Lab.”

We’ll be at The Lab next Wednesday, July 23rd from 6-8 at Velocity’s Seattle store: 251 Yale Ave N. If you’re in the Seattle area, please come! And bring some friends, and lots of questions — we really prefer to talk about whatever is most interesting to the people who are present, rather than reading from our book ad nauseam.

Hope to see you there!

And hey, on a totally off-topic note: Anyone manage to see the first episode of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog before the server crashed? Well, I didn’t, and I’m antsy. I may have to shell out for the iTunes version… [Never mind, it came back up, and it’s awesome!]

I’m always on the lookout for business books that embrace, promote & celebrate small & locally-owned businesses. I don’t believe that small & local are always or inherently better, but I have a strong affinity for spending my dollars on products and services that help support the livelihoods of good people, and supporting my neighbours is even better. I like to get to know the people who create the products I buy, because service means a great deal to me, and because I enjoy knowing a little bit about the ethics and values of the people I’m giving my money to.

So I am intrigued by this book: Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy

The blurb begins:

In an era when incomprehensibly complex issues like Peak Oil and climate change dominate headlines, practical solutions at a local level can seem somehow inadequate.

In response, Lyle Estill’s Small is Possible introduces us to “hometown security,” with this chronicle of a community-powered response to resource depletion in a fickle global economy. True stories, springing from the soils of Chatham County, North Carolina, offer a positive counterbalance to the bleakness of our age.

This is the story of how one small southern US town found actual solutions to actual problems. Unwilling to rely on the government and wary of large corporations, these residents discovered it is possible for a community to feed itself, fuel itself, heal itself, and govern itself.

If any of you have read Small is Possible, I’d love to hear your thoughts — or indeed your thoughts about small/local businesses in general.

(I also spotted another interesting-looking book from the same publisher: Ecopreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits.)

I love it when my professional-geek life and my author life intersect. I was checking out the new issue of the esteemed web design e-zine A List Apart today, and came across Natalie Jost’s excellent article on working from home, “Walking the Line When You Work From Home,” and the lessons therein definitely apply to freelancers and home workers across industries — not just web designers.

Emira and I worked out of a corner of my bedroom when we started Raised Eyebrow, graduated to the living room a little later (when space allowed), and only took on a full-time office schedule after two or three years in business. I have occasional pangs for the comfort & quiet of working from home, but now that we have a larger team, it’s much more efficient to have everyone working in the same location. That being said, we’ve been forced into working from home the last couple of days, due to a massive power outage in downtown Vancouver that took down our office building, and what Jost says about having a devoted office space is definitely true: Now that I no longer have my home computer set up for professional use, I’m nowhere near as efficient…

We’re a little late in posting about this, but we’re very pleased to have been featured in The Financial Post. Many thanks to Wendy McLellan, who wrote the article and did a great job of conveying the key message of The Boss of You in classic pithy journalist style.

The ever-inspiring Cinnamon Cooper of Poise.cc has written an absolutely lovely post about The Boss of You at her blog. Those who’ve read the book might recognize Cinnamon as one of the women we interviewed for the book, and her advice and stories are peppered throughout The Boss of You. Cinnamon has been reading the book over the past while and her post touches on how useful the book has been for her as a more established entrepreneur, which is really wonderful feedback to get as while we wanted the book the be a guide for those of you just starting out, we also wanted to make sure it contained information that would sustain you beyond the early days.

In addition to her praise of the book, Cinnamon has purchased a copy of the book to give away to a reader, so if you’re looking to pick up a copy check out her blog post and comment to be entered to win.

And you can expect to see a more in-depth profile of Cinnamon’s bag business here in the coming weeks as we continue to profile the amazing women who were kind enough to share their experiences for our book.

A client called me the other day to tell me she’d spotted a seller on eBay who had lifted elements of her product design — but even more blatantly, was adorning her eBay pages with graphics she’d stolen from my client’s website. In these days of digital everything, it’s easier and easier to rip off photos, graphics, and design ideas from other people, and increasingly difficult to protect yourself against copyright infringers.

But one area that’s dead easy to police on your own is your website copy. We’ve been in business over eight years, and we’ve found our own words promoting other people’s web design services dozens of times. My favourite is when they steal our mission statement — and if you can believe it, I’ve seen that happen more times than I can count. They may think they’re being sincerely flattering, but are in fact merely lazy and dishonest. Maybe it’s my past as a teaching assistant coming out, but I have no patience for plagiarizers.

All you have to do is the Google equivalent of random drug testing.

Highlight a sentence (or part of one) on your website with your mouse, copy it to your clipboard, and paste it into Google’s search box, with quotation marks on either side. (The quotation marks tell Google you want to search for that exact phrase.) For example, I usually start my plagiarism hunt by searching for a phrase that appears in the opening paragraph on our website: “Our goal is to serve as a resource for quality website development and information”. Just that much is usually enough to generate a few hits, from the offenders who really couldn’t be bothered to make an effort. (I mean, if you’re gonna steal our copy, maybe take it from somewhere other than the home page?)

From there, I do random spot tests, grabbing a phrase from our most highly-trafficked pages, and areas that are most likely to attract thieves: descriptions of the services we offer, copy about our expertise, and of course, the mission statement (since I know it to be a gleaming bit of tinfoil for those second-string web-designer magpies). I usually turn up a handful of offenders, and I then email them one by one to point out the page(s) on their website that contain the stolen text, and request that they replace it immediately with something they’ve written.

I find for the most part people react quickly and with at least a modicum of shame. Some are polite enough to respond with an apology; others simply update their sites without replying to my emails. I’ve never resorted to legal action, though I suppose I might consider it if the offense were really significant (i.e. if they’d stolen a lot of copy), and persistent.

I recommend setting aside an hour (or less) every few months to check Google for imitators. After all, when you’ve gone to all the trouble of writing your mission statement, the last thing you want is to let someone else cheat off your homework and get away with it.

Did any of you see the New York Times article, “Would You Hire Your Husband?”

Collecting a handful of examples of men employed by their wives’ businesses, the story has such a perpetual tone of amazement, I half expect the author’s face to be frozen into an o-mouthed, eyebrows-raised mask of surprise. The subtext that runs throughout the piece can be summarizes thusly: Did you know that some men are not only progressive enough to work for a woman, but for their very own wife?, it muses.

Of course, it continues with furrowed brow, given their fragile male egos and manly need to act as family breadwinners, it’s vewy vewy hard for them to play second fiddle to their wives, and they require special treatment.

The men interviewed for this article seemed comfortable working at family companies controlled by their wives, perhaps because those who agree to that arrangement are not threatened by it. It was the wives who tended to be more sensitive about the potential pitfalls of having their husbands on the payroll.

One entrepreneur decided that to avoid her husband (whom she met after hiring him to work for her) feeling undervalued as a mere employee, she would take an approach I can only describe as bizarre and convoluted:

“One year I get the lower salary, and he gets a higher salary, and the next year we reverse it,” she said.

“I don’t think Greg could feel emasculated, because he is such a balanced individual and sure of himself,” she added. “But I did not want him to feel undervalued.”

Now, I find it difficult to understand how a) commanding a lower salary than your CEO spouse could possibly constitute EMASCULATION, and b) why, if she’s so concerned about his ego, she doesn’t just cut her salary to the same level as his. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just earn equal incomes, rather than always having one person earning more than the other? Does he really need to earn more than her half the time? (And if he does, could he maybe consider starting his own company and competing with her the good old-fashioned way?)

On the one hand, I hate to give the story any more time than it deserves by even talking about it — but on the other, it got me riled up enough I had to post a little rant here. Can you imagine anyone writing in the Times about women working for their husbands and being content to earn a little less and keep to the wings while their spouses hog the spotlight? No, because it’s not news. And neither is this small set of anecdotes about the tables being turned (for once).

And don’t get me started about the fact they didn’t include a single same-sex couple (or unmarried couple, for that matter) in their examples…