The 2-Day 50€ Agency
This article’s contents:
- Why scale?
- Target Group
- Hiring for free
- Website & Domain — 20,20€
- Marketing — 19,34€
- My Free Planning & Workflow Tools
Why scale?
The reason why we do what we do is the most important thing in life! The right “why” helps us prevail and stay motivated at all times to find our “what” and “how”. I’ve been a freelance UX Designer and Facilitator since the beginning of 2023. I love Facilitation and 6 months ago I set an intention and put in the work to become a full-time Facilitator by the end of this year. Ever since then I’m getting more and more gigs with high-profile clients (Yay!). This limits the time that I can invest into my freelance design projects. However, there is a demand for my services and I get very excited at the thought of growing my leadership & project management skills further, by hiring talent (Is it not crazy how much you can challenge yourself when you start freelancing?!).
The only logical outcome was to scale my freelance business to an agency which took me 2 days— With LeepRoot I am hiring talented UX / UI Designers and coaching them while they get to work my real design projects that they can add to their portfolio. All UX Designers know that Junior Designers have a really hard time on the job market right now. Despite that I decided to pay above minimum wage. Call me stupid, but I’m lowkey proud about staying true to my values. Most medium -sized companies in The Netherlands pay students 300€ a month for their (!)full-time internsips! That’s often less than 3€ an hour!?…
Let’s do things differently.
Target Group
Nothing in business is more important than knowing your target group. Ideally you can put your pitch into sentence like this:
At LeepRoot we create websites and we design brand identities for Dutch Incubator Startups that want to make the world a better place.
If you can’t concisely define your target group and the value you provide, then it’s probably not yet time to scale.
Hiring For Free
The most interesting part when transitioning from freelancing to agency owning, is hiring talent. Luckily, I have a network of trusted, talented designers. Having collaborated on volunteering work before helps everyone involved ease into this new business territory. The hiring process is thus free, but payment is tied to the projects that I’ve already secured. Therefore, my ROI on hiring is guaranteed…
To pay my collaborators, I use Verloning.nl. because Junior Designers are often not registered as Freelancers. And being a freelancer myself, I otherwise couldn’t pay them legally since I can only invoice people that have a VAT-ID. And if you haven’t noticed yet, I like living with a clean concious, and therefore, I don’t do tikkies ;)
Website & Domain-Bundle — 20,20€ first year
I have a green webhosting server plan with Dogado for 72€/year. It has 10 Databases which means it can host 10 different sites — doing the math, this results in 7,20€ per site. Getting the leeproot.com & .nl domain bundle with strato costs me 13€ for the first year. If the new website gets one additional project that would give me my ROI, for sure.
In setting up the page, I created a barebone wordpress website that looks good enough to quickly test the reception to LeepRoot’s services and have an aesthetic, running operation. Furthermore, I can already monitor traffic and I’m discoverable via search engines from Day 1. To save costs, I built the website in Wordpress which is a free CMS with a bit of a learning curve though. The site will soon also showcase LeepRoots current projects and my networking at events will .
Marketing — 19,34€
This brings us to marketing. Firstly, I designed business cards which cost me 19,34€. “Why”, you might ask… “Aren’t they out of fashion”? To be honest, I haven’t had any business cards in my 18 months of freelancing and would be inclined to agree with you in a heartbeat. However, I was also still exploring what I wanted to do and for which target audience. Since I know that now, the time has come.
I will be attending the Phillips Innovation Awards Finals — an event that the whole Startup Industry will be following closely. Many investors, multipliers and ambitious founders will be in attendance — including me. I’ll be there to support Madglove Amsterdam, a Startup that I have successfully designed a Website and Social Media Templates for. They’re one of the finalist this year!! Thus, a perfect opportunity to support this amazing startup while generating new leads in my target market!
I am also looking into marketing automation and online ads. I ran Insta Ads with my retired workout community “Flowing Fitness NL” before, and that went okay-good amount of click-throughs but I had no way of tracking them across platforms then. So I’ll probably try again. Marketing automation is crucial to me. After all, I sense that it is my calling to work as a Facilitator more and less as a Designer. I want to permanently solidify myself as a Facilitator & Speaker about holistic health within the future of work business. Starting a freelance agency helps me increase my network, improve my leadership skills and gives me ressources to eventually take the leap.
Free Planning & Workflow toools
Almost as important as your value proposition statement are your frameworks and your internal workflow. Especially when onbording collaborators it is important to be on top of your project management. Here are the free tools I use:
Notion- Life saver (FREE)
Sprint planning, Scrum Board, Project Documentation… All of it setup in less than two days
Figma — The Multitalent (FREE)
Briefing Presentations, Design Collaboration, Clients can commenting for seemless revision & Interactive documentation PDF’s for my clients to take home for maintenance and future collaborations.
Calendly - For Client Calls (FREE)
Scheduling calls easily… say less.
Canva - Project Proposals & Sales Pitching (FREE)
I prep website review PDF’s and project proposal slides with Canva. So it covers both the early fishing for projects & the closing sales conversations
Well, that’s it for this article.. You can visit leeproot.com for Startup Design Services, or jimekanem.com for Workshop Facilitation
Or reach out to me via linkedin.com/in/jim-ekanem
And of course you can keep exlporing my other articles:
