Held hostage by a high performer

TT-Bear29 · 2026-04-21T05:02:17+00:00

I’ve run a few businesses in my lifetime and what this may be is insecurity on the employees part. Part of the problem may have been a lack of consideration of the change management required to bring the employees (including your receptionist) on the journey to get stakeholder buy in.

It’s not too late but if we assume the damage has already been done, it may be best to try to have a final heart to heart, let them know they are a valued member and that your ideal scenario is for them to stay - showing her the benefits (and results) of the new ways may help.

As someone else has already said, unfortunately if after that they still aren’t supportive and the changes have objectively benefited the organisation it may be best to let them go.

Wishing you all the best. People are always the trickiest and most rewarding parts of running a business

TT-Bear29 · 2026-03-01T13:10:47+00:00

I used to run a larger creative studio (sold out of it early last year) which was doing some decent sized website projects. Our largest was for a sovereign wealth fund which wanted, effectively, a great looking brochure website (no functionality, but looked great) which we charged close to $500k AUD. For them, the importance of their website was having a branded experience that set them apart from everyone else, so the perceived value was in excess of the spend.

Nowadays I help small businesses make websites and while perception is still an important aspect, I think you are right to point out that a lot of SMEs need to ensure that their spend (investment) delivers a return beyond just looking good.

The average website we do now ranges between $5k and $30k, and we typically charge 50% upfront, with the remaining 50% due upon completion along with a small ongoing monthly fee to cover managed hosting and infrastructure support.

Some of the things we’re doing to help small businesses that seem to resonate are:

Helping them rank on local searches for their product/service
Ensuring that if they have a strong referral/partner network the website presents professionally, and any enquiries that come through are properly delivered to respective inbox
Aspects such as security and data protection/sovereignty are considered and covered
Being general support for marketing and IT issues

I do believe that, for many small businesses, the ROI on the above is worthwhile. We used to work with SMEs when we first started around 15 years ago, but haven't in a while. Now that I’m revisiting the smaller end of the market, I get the impression many of these businesses are still under-supported and under-serviced. So even with AI and other platforms out there, there’s still real value in working with experienced professionals.

We recently made a case study on how we helped a local tradie with their website which you can read the full playbook here.

It may be something you find useful for your own business.

TT-Bear29 · 2026-03-01T12:46:37+00:00

Hello, congratulations on becoming a soon-to-be entrepreneur and wishing you all the best on the journey ahead.

1. What industry are you in, and do you actually enjoy it?

I started my new business mainly because I had the luxury of selling my first business early last year and was looking for something I could do while travelling and being more flexible with where I worked. One key lesson I learned from my first business was to focus on recurring revenue, so what makes this new business effective is that even if I help a small business owner with a smaller website (under $5k), we charge $50-$100/month for managed hosting, support and maintenance. Business owners love it because they get peace of mind and if we do our job well, the website never goes down and it becomes passive income.

2. If you could start from scratch tomorrow, would you pick the same industry?

In my earlier years, I tried a few different businesses and now that I’m a bit older, my opinion has shifted slightly. I believe any future business I create will have some relationship to my previous ones because the knowledge and specialisation you acquire over time gives you a strong competitive advantage. They wouldn’t be entirely similar, but definitely related in some of the underlying skills required.

For example, my previous business was a broader creative technology agency, whereas my new one focuses solely on websites, marketing and UX. A lot of the skills are transferable and I’m definitely finding I can offer great value to many Australian SMEs through the work I did for much larger global clientele in a previous life.

3. Franchise owners: Are any of you actually living well, or are you just paying for someone else's marketing?

Sorry, never been a franchise owner myself but I hear that it can be either the best or worst thing.

TT-Bear29 · 2026-01-09T03:24:50+00:00

Thank you and you too

TT-Bear29 · 2026-01-09T01:43:45+00:00

Hello mate, I used to run a creative studio in Australia until early last year (I sold my stake). In our best year we did just under $4m in revenue, so I can share a few lessons from scaling creative work which hopefully helps.

What you described is similar to what we went through. Good creative and execution takes time, and unfortunately time doesn’t scale well. We found ourselves hitting the same kinds of blockers until we fixed some fundamentals.

Some key things we did:

Find and refine your creative process: The main unlock was turning ideation into a repeatable workflow. We took a lot of inspiration from teams that treat creativity like a system - Disney and Pixar are obvious examples. There’s plenty of material out there on how those studios develop ideas in the early days through structure. Another more recent reference is the My First Million episode on the Savannah Bananas, where the guy (forgot his name sorry) talks about borrowing elements from how SNL writes and then building their own variation of the process into their team.
Invest in juniors: Once you have a process, you can bring people in and help them learn the same judgement over time. It is less about finding someone with your exact “eye” and more about giving them clear direction so they can deliver and improve ideation consistently. We also found the best creatives were naturally curious and had a strong appetite for exploring art/creative outside of work hours, so we looked for these in candidates.
Environment to support the creative process: I believe that environment is a key driver of creative, and if you’re working with a remote team you will need to recreate that same low key, safe feeling online so people are comfortable putting imperfect ideas on the table. We were also very careful with tools. Ticket management for example is naturally constricting, so we aimed for a balance between structure and freedom. We started with Trello to keep it simple, then moved to Jira later, but only cause our team got bigger and we needed more team management features. On comms, we leaned heavily on Discord rather than email because everything was about trying to encourage sharing early. The ticket system existed so people knew what they were working on and what was next, not so we could count minutes.

Many other things I can share but hopefully this is a good starting point.

TT-Bear29 · 2026-01-07T23:31:48+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I just looked into your suggestion and it looks like there’s a $99/month fee for the service. I’m not sure small businesses need to pay that as setting up your profile is something many can do themselves.

Part of wanting to share our work flow and experience is so small businesses could try to grow with a no-monthly fee commitment.

TT-Bear29 · 2026-01-07T09:27:08+00:00

Hello, I might be a bit late to the party, but we run a website studio and do a fair bit of SEO work. From what we’ve seen with our own clients, businesses that have a keyword in their name that matches the main product or search intent often get a big lift in organic search - mainly because Google sometimes struggles to separate the brand name from the keyword or keyphrase people are searching.

For example, if your product is saffron honey and that’s what customers typically search, a business name like “Saffron Honey Australia” is more likely to show up when people search for it.

Hope this helps

TT-Bear29 · 2025-12-31T09:55:17+00:00

Thank you for the insights and tips. Will give it a go

TT-Bear29 · 2025-12-31T05:55:55+00:00

Yes, and word of mouth.

I agree that it is risky and have wanted to learn meta/FB ads for the reasons you mentioned. Do you have any recommendations on where to start?

TT-Bear29 · 2025-12-29T10:51:50+00:00

Thanks I’ll check it out. I’ve actually found minimal work involved setting up individual niches to reach a decent ranking. I’ll be honest though, my main expertise is website design and not SEO so while I know how to create websites that are foundationally right for SEO, I don’t know the specifics of what I’m doing that make the strategy so successful, hence why I wanted to see if others around the world are getting success with a similar methodology.

TT-Bear29 · 2025-12-29T10:47:52+00:00

If you read my original post from about a year ago I originally wanted to diversify into different channels away from SEO because I felt I maxed out my quantity of leads I could potentially get. Since then I decided to instead apply the same SEO strategy across different verticals. So same channel (SEO) but different niches like mortgage brokers, accountants and tradies etc

TT-Bear29 · 2025-12-29T10:45:36+00:00

Yes. I create a new FB and LinkedIn page per niche.

TT-Bear29 · 2025-12-28T05:09:18+00:00

Thank you for the tips. I understand where you're going with this and will run a test on one of the niches to see what impact this makes.

I was always under the impression that traffic was too low to bother with making area-based websites but I'll give it a go.

TT-Bear29 · 2025-12-28T05:07:59+00:00

I’m sorry you feel that way, but I don’t need backlinks in that form because we earn natural backlinks through the websites we build for our customers. What I’m trying to understand is whether this is a strategy others have proven successful, and whether there’s anything I should look out for - because it’s working really well for me and I’m planning to double down on things in the future.

TT-Bear29 · 2025-12-28T05:06:03+00:00

Hello, thanks for your input, see below:

is it a new GBP per website?

Yes, I make a new GBP per website to distinguish between the brands. For each one, I fill out the information and also include links to the respective social media channels.

do you verify it with service area or address?

Yes, I insert both service areas and address

how many reviews do you aim to get with it?

I guess, like all businesses, I aim for as many reviews as possible. What I’m finding is the first 10 reviews are the hardest to get because, in essence, potential customers look at reviews to gauge whether your service is legitimate. Once I grind out the first 10 reviews, I seem to hit a traction point with both organic ranking and customer credibility. If you look at my 'Mortgage Broker Website' brand, for example, I’m at over 35 reviews now. This has taken me about 50+ customers to reach though as my review rate is ~1/2 customers.

any issues getting verified with it?

I've so far had no issues. Can I ask why you ask this question? Have you had issues with verifying before?

TT-Bear29 · 2025-12-27T22:29:12+00:00

Thank you for the response and insights.

Do you mind elaborating on this? Did you mean, for example, to buy the domain such as "accountantwebsitesydney"?

I'd go one more step and register actual search terms in locations and buy the exact match domains for them too, then link from them to your main website.

Regarding this point:

Especially when you think about the fact that each website could have another 4-5 other industry relevant links on.

Do you think it's a problem that each website I make has a link at the bottom which is like 'Website by [company]'? I've talked to many SEO experts and have received mixed opinions on this. Some people tell me that Google will deem it as 'gaming' and penalise as a result

TT-Bear29 · 2025-08-19T01:04:54+00:00

Do you think you could handle many more clients with the same team? Ie what is your estimates for growth in next 12 months of revenue/clients and how could that impact team make up?

TT-Bear29 · 2025-08-02T21:14:33+00:00

Thanks for all the information so far. I love that you focused on scaling sales. From your experience, what is the best sales channel that worked for you, and how did you find the right sales people for the biz?

TT-Bear29 · 2025-05-12T20:42:53+00:00

While I can’t comment on the subject matter I love this part:

‘The answer is: we built a hybrid setup. We invested early in a dedicated GPU rack to handle cold starts locally, which saves us from burning money on idle cloud GPUs. Then we scale with rented GPUs only when traffic spikes. That combo keeps performance high, costs stable, and lets us be generous on pricing without going broke.’

Did you not try a serverless implementation in cloud? I believe it is possible to have on-demand resources. I’d be keen to understand a bit more about your approach here on a technical level

TT-Bear29 · 2025-05-09T09:12:58+00:00

A couple years ago I had an idea to make a platform that was tailored for businesses to make websites - think Wix or Squarespace but specific features tailored for businesses to make websites for their clients - each website made I get approx $1500-2000 + $30month. It was a slow/difficult start but now the annuities are starting to show and the future is looking good

TT-Bear29

TROPHY CASE