This Is How Divya Went from Struggling Freelancer to Owner of a High-End Web Design Agency

Meet Divya – one of our members at Business Mentor Insiders (BMI). She joined BMI in December 2018 and has gone on to build a successful online agency by implementing what she learned from BMI. This is her story…

In the Beginning

Before joining BMI Divya was freelancing full time online and was struggling to get many new clients and found that she was spending a lot of her time sending out proposals to potential clients without much success.

Divya was using Upwork as her main source of finding new clients. She would mainly work with one client at a time, and although she was earning OK money it was hard to scale her business. One of the major reasons for this is because she was earning an hourly rate and the projects were often paid on an upfront number of hours. So if the project took longer she didn’t get paid any extra money. 

Joining BMI

After becoming increasingly frustrated with a lack of traction in her business and not being able to close new clients (despite sending out hundreds of proposals) Divya began researching online about how to improve her Upwork success rate. During this extensive research, she came across the BMI YouTube channel and was impressed by what she saw. This led her to join the BMI program.

What Divya Learned Through BMI

One of the most important things she learned was to start pitching prospective clients from a position of ‘how you can help them’ and ‘what problems you can solve for them’. This led to her getting a lot more responses to proposals and getting clients onto calls. For Divya, this allowed her to have more control over the relationship with clients, and over how she carried out her work. She felt more of a business owner than an employee and loved the fact that she could start to be pickier about which clients she agreed to work with. Basically she went from being desperate for work to be in a position to choose her own clients.

Through BMI Divya discovered the benefits of diversifying her services to offer more high-profit services. When she joined BMI she was mainly focused on offering WordPress services to clients but found that the projects would often be quite low paid and not require a lot of time. It was harder to find longer and better-paid projects. BMI taught her how to find better-paying services to offer and how to sell them to clients. A big part of this change also involved going from offering hourly work to working on a per-project basis. This change has allowed her to double her revenue.

Another big change was to bring on other freelancers to help her with project delivery. She began by outsourcing parts of projects first (in her case design work) and still carried out most of the development work herself. This process of gradual outsourcing has allowed her to master her business processes and she is aiming in the future to outsource almost all of the project delivery so she can concentrate on running her agency. She has managed to implement this change without her product quality suffering, she has found that if she manages the relationship with the client herself then this new model has been a great success for all parties.

The new way her business operates (thanks to BMI) allowed her to have more control over her business. She says in the past she would have no control over a project since she was just an hourly freelancer, now she has ownership over the total project which has given her a sense of control and finds it far more satisfying. 

Divya says that her business is now in a great position to scale thanks to what she learned through BMI. She has found a sense of community from other entrepreneurs in the BMI program an amazing resource to help her along her journey. Being able to pose questions and get answers from other entrepreneurs has allowed her to make much more informed decisions about her business.

Divya says she still has a lot to learn and still runs into issues that she needs help with. The BMI Facebook group, BMI group calls, and training materials are a great resource when she gets stuck. BMI has given her access to numerous experienced mentors.

The Future Is Bright

After joining BMI Divya has been able to grow her business by signing up bigger value projects, and she is especially pleased with being able to work with clients that she wants to work with. Her business now is in a great place and this has spread to her personal life where she has found that her business can be run in a much more flexible way, giving her much more freedom to decide when and how she works. Divya recommends BMI to anyone who wants to have their own business and learn how to build a team around them.

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