Web Design Business with Josh Hall
The Web Design Business Podcast with host Josh Hall is here to help you build a web design business that allows you to have freedom and a lifestyle you love. As a web designer and web agency owner of over a decade, Josh knows the challenges, struggles and often painful lessons of building a web design business without any guidance, proven strategies or a mentor to help you along the way, which is why this show exists. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of coaching, mentorship and guidance to help you build your dream web design business. All while having a good time doing it. Through interviews with seasoned web design business professionals and online entrepreneurs, solo coaching episodes with Josh and even case studies with his students, you’ll learn practical tips and strategies for web business building along with real-world advice and trends that are happening right now in the wild and wonderful world of web design. Subscribe if you’re ready to start or level up your web design business and for all show notes, links, full transcriptions for each episode, head to https://joshhall.co/podcast
Web Design Business with Josh Hall
366 - 50% Marketing - 50% Services with James Barnard
Ever wondered how to have time to market your business while still having time to get design projects done?
Well, there’s no magic formula and striking the balance between the two is tricky. But a great example of someone doing this well is my dude from down under, word-class logo designer James Barnard.
James follows a simple 50/50 approach. Meaning 50% of his work is dedicated to marketing (social media, videos, speaking, interviews) and 50% is dedicated to service work (proposals, calls, logo designs, admin work, etc)
It was awesome catching up with James to dig into this topic more which – speaking of 50% – is actually only 50% of this conversation. This turns into a coaching call about halfway through as we dig into James’ lead funnel and we pinpointed some very interesting challenges that I helped walk him through.
I hope everything we covered together helps you and your lead funnel/bad-fit weeding out processes as well.
P.S. I recently posted about the website audit I did for James following this call that you can check out here! It’ll be a great next step after hearing our convo.
Head to the show notes to get all links and resources we mentioned along with a full transcription of this episode at joshhall.co/366
Big thanks to the sponsors for our upcoming Web Designer Pro CON 2025 event! We couldn't make such a top-notch event for my community without their support 🙏
17hats (for proposals, invoicing, contracts and automation)
SiteGround (for website hosting)
Termageddon (for auto-updating privacy po
one for me, one for the algorithm. So I know how to make videos that I know will go viral. It's usually this kind of format you find a problem within your software. You solve that problem with a unique tip or trick that no one's heard of before and you put it all to an absolute banger of a track and usually it pops off. So no dialogue. Those videos do really really well. They're kind of more appealing globally because there's no language barrier, barrier. You're just illustrating what to do with no dialogue and those videos do really really really well and that's a great way to go viral.
James Barnard:But it's not a great way to get followers because there's not that much value there. The people it's kind of like a um, a cheat code. Do you know what I mean? Like people, people actually don't get a lot from it. They might get a little tip or trick, but largely, if you just have videos like that, it's kind of hard to follow. So I like to intersperse that content with actual explainer videos and I get on camera and I talk Um, and those videos don't do nearly as well, and I know they won't do nearly as well.
James Barnard:Like, I posted a video yesterday about um sizing guides for logo design. So how to make a versatile logo is to make a logo that's the same width and height, so like a square or a circle, because it's more versatile in more spaces. Obviously, that's not sexy content. No one really loves that kind of that content on social media. It won't go viral. I think it's on like 40,000 views in the last sort of 12 hours or so, which isn't that great on instagram, you know, with some of my following. But the people who love it are my current followers and people who are looking to get more out of design and actually learn about the industry, and I love making that that kind of content welcome to the web design business podcast with your host, josh hall helping you build a web design business that gives you freedom and a lifestyle you love.
Josh Hall:It's so great to have back onto the podcast my friend from down under, james Barnard. Now, if you are in the design space at all, he probably doesn't need much of an introduction. James has he's closing in on actually 1 million followers across his Instagram, tiktok, youtube and a couple other channels and what I wanted to dive into in this session with James was how the heck he manages marketing his business, like posting content on social media, but also having time to do his design work. If you don't know James, he is a logo designer, a world-class logo designer, so I'm very curious about how the heck he manages to do both. That's what we get into in this convo. This is kind of a two-part conversation because the first half is about that split between marketing and service work. The second half is actually a bit of an impromptu coaching call. James had some issues that we addressed and got into here about his lead funnel. James had some issues that we addressed and got into here about his lead funnel. He is spending a lot of time way too much time with somebody with his profile in weeding out bad fit clients. So this is kind of a half coaching call. So I really hope you enjoy it Now, after this call, james and I actually did a bit of a audit for his website and I followed up with that actually prior to this.
Josh Hall:So if you would like to see the ins and outs of the website audit I did for James, I'm going to link that in the show notes. Big thanks to James for actually sharing that via his email list and on his social media as well. Appreciate that and man always so good catching up with James. I hope everything we covered here helps you, particularly those of you who are doing some marketing or social media as your main strategy for getting clients. The show notes for this episode are going to be found at joshhallco slash three, six, six, everything I just mentioned. And if you want to connect with James, head over to his website, barnardco, and from there you can link to his Instagram, tik TOK and all the other social media channels. If you're one of the very few who are not following him because most designers are All right, here's my chat with James. James, it's good to have you back. You're friends with Chris. Do your second time on the Web Design Business Podcast. Could life get any better?
James Barnard:I know just the top of the world right now. Yeah, it's been absolutely fantastic. Thank you very much for having me back. I actually listened to our podcast again in the car the other day and and yeah, it's quite interesting just having that as like a little time capsule moment, something to refer back to to see like, where things have gone since we last spoke, because last time I was on, we were talking about the fact that I did everything myself, and then after that you and I got on an Instagram live, if I recall and we went through the pros and cons of hiring an assistant and eventually I pulled the plug on that at some point after that call that we had. So I'm sure we've got lots to talk about today, but yeah, it's been great. It's been fantastic. What a whirlwind.
Josh Hall:Heck, yeah, dude Gosh, I feel like it was last year. It was two years ago. I think it was Almost two years ago that we chatted, gosh, I can't believe it's been that long. Yeah, you were. What's interesting about that, and kind of one thing I wanted to start out with here, is that when I had you on the first time, it was like hey, james, you want to come on to my podcast? Now I'm like I've on my podcast. The tides have turned, dude. Your social media has absolutely blown up. You're closing in on 600 K followers, which is going to be the next milestone for you. Um, is Tik TOK as big as Instagram for you, or is one bigger than the other?
James Barnard:One's bigger than the other. Instagram is a bit larger than Tik TOK, but Tik TOK was where I got my start and that's where I got my first sort of viral video, uh, which kind of kicked the kind of content game off for me really. It was a video that I posted on TikTok bragging about the fact that I got some of my logos into a design book, and it was just really lucky the way it happened. I said I was talking about the logo lounge book and because of my British accent, the American audience thought I was saying Legos. So they stayed to the end to see the Lego designs that I'd done and then they got disappointed and that was one of the reasons that it was a bit of engagement was that people were arguing in the chat like where are the Legos, where are the Lego designs? So it was total luck that that first video went viral. But because of that one viral video, like we said last time, I had so I had so many leads within that single day which kind of like just exploded my um, my business. It really kind of turned things around for me and I realized that the content, uh, the social media content game, was where I needed to be to bring in leads for my business, and since then I kind of just have not stopped. And then, obviously, posting to both TikTok and Instagram has meant that my Instagram following has come along with the TikTok following. And then I just had a few more viral videos on Instagram, which has meant the follower count has just exploded.
James Barnard:Sorry, early last year, this time last year I had two videos that hit like something like that eight or nine, 10 million view mark. Wow, kind of back to back. My follower account just exploded. I think I hit like 500 000 early last year, which is just insane. And you know you get those sort of um, the little analytics on your, on your account. It says how many accounts have seen your posts this week and at one point it was like eight million people have seen your, um, your content. I was like that is so overwhelming. I kind of like freaked out a little bit. It was like 8 million people have seen your, um, your content. I was like that is so overwhelming, I kind of like freaked out a little bit. So it's, it's. Those kinds of numbers are really really kind of intimidating.
Josh Hall:Well, that's I was kind of curious about too was the overwhelming nature of this. I joked with you, like you you apologize for not getting back to my DM recently, and I was like oh, dude, I can't imagine your DMs. I, dude, I can't imagine your dms. I would think you probably have like a dmva at this point, like I can't imagine the amount of inbound that's coming in at this level.
James Barnard:I would need a dude as an assistant to help me out, because I it's one of those things where you're you're checking your phone, your phone is like buzzing constantly and you look down and you go I'll respond to that later and then you forget. It's one of those typical things that I just get notifications on your dms.
Josh Hall:Do you get buzzed when someone dms?
James Barnard:no, I switch them off. So like when it, when it comes in, um, it kind of depends if the app's turned off or not, but usually I don't because it's just insane. Like my wife gets really annoyed at me. I post a video, usually around sort of 3 or 4 pm my time, and then when the us audience wakes up and all the notifications start coming in, my phone is on the dresser when we're going to bed going, which is like turn your phone off, otherwise it'll keep her up all night. But yeah, it's hard to stay on top of them. If you have a video that does like a million plus views, as you can imagine, it's just impossible to stay on top of all the comments and stuff. So you kind of have to take it a little piece at a time.
Josh Hall:Yeah, I was just going to say do you skim through and see like people you recognize, or are people starting to be familiar? How the heck do you manage a nearly 600,000 person Instagram, just alone the DMS, how do you? Yeah, how do you manage that?
James Barnard:I mean, it's not it, it's not totally crazy, it's more the comments. Obviously you want to be responding to the comments on the videos to keep the engagement going. The jury's out on whether that actually helps your videos or not. To be honest, I'll usually respond to most of the comments that come in the first hour because that's when I can manage them, as the video might be ramping up. Um, once it hits, like you know, 30, 40 plus comments, I kind of just like I can't.
James Barnard:So I will scroll down and like what happens is Instagram will prioritize comments from people that you follow. So if anybody kind of um, I follow people or my friends on Instagram, I'll obviously respond to those guys. Um, but other than that, it kind of it all gets kind of filtered through and it's it's really hard to stay on top of it. Honestly, I feel bad, like not responding. Usually I'll respond to a comment if it's negative, which is terrible. So if someone comes in like slags me off or says something completely empty, what I've, what I've done, I've just missed the point of my video entirely I'll usually respond to that, which is the worst way to you know, handle, handle those comments, because then you're only dealing with the negative stuff that comes through, but it's usually. That's usually enough for me to, you know, get my, unlock my phone and then start actually responding to someone who's trolled me.
Josh Hall:Well, I don't know if Instagram functions exactly like Facebook, but I know this is just top of mind because I recently had a Web Designer Pro member who launched her business with a bit of a social media campaign. She intentionally did comment on her posts after a few days, like she would let comments come in and then go back and comment just to bring it back up. So I don't know if the algorithms work exactly the same, but my thought would be an engaged comment section is going to create a signal and boost things up, I would think.
James Barnard:Yeah, definitely it does. It's just here's a point where you know how the comments trickle in for weeks afterwards. How long do I keep that going on a single post, cause it's exhausting. Um, and you know my my time is limited and, like we said last time on this podcast, I do do most of this myself. Well, socially, everything myself. I don't have anybody that helps me out on my video editing or creating concepts for videos. The only kind of help I've got at the moment is actually in the logo design side of things. So, yeah, it's exhausting trying to stay on top of it all and, honestly, I get a bit burnt out from it. I need to have breaks from social media, otherwise this can become really, really overwhelming.
Josh Hall:Yeah, I mean I think you're well past a level where it's like anyone who has any sort of public profile or big profile. There's just so much inbound there's there's no way a human can keep up with it. Even if, even if you didn't still do some service work and even if you took less off your plate with content, there's just no way you could keep up with all that. So I I know personally, um, I mean, my, my profile isn't near like yours is, but I'm already at the point where I almost can't manage my email and my inbound anymore. Um, and I realized it's not. I don't feel bad anymore if I can't get back to an email, like when I.
Josh Hall:I get a lot of guest pitches now for this podcast and I used to get back to everyone with a super thoughtful reply and say, hey, I really appreciate it, I checked out their site. Now I just kind of I keep a record of them and I review them monthly, but I'm probably just going to ghost a lot of people who do guest reach outs. Now if it's something where they ask me for an interview, I try to always respond, at least at the level I am now. But all that to say like. I do feel like once your online presence grows and I think for web designers and designers in general, this happens with clients too. It's like leads shouldn't be treated the same as paying clients or hot leads who are in the system. So that's kind of the same approach I've taken on social media as well, in just online presence.
James Barnard:Yeah, I get a lot of DMs come through from students and people like that. I really do try and respond, especially if they're like juniors starting out. Or if somebody says something like I don't know whether I want to continue doing this graphic design thing, I'll try and respond to people like that because I want to continue doing this graphic design thing. I'll try and respond to people like that because I want them to stay in the industry. And there's a big problem in graphic design. It's like something like two out of five people quit within the first three years, or some horrible statistic like that, and I hate that. I think it's just people don't have the support and they don't have the kind of confidence to keep going, and so I do try and respond to those kind of comments. But it have the kind of confidence to keep going and so I do try and respond to those kind of comments.
James Barnard:But it is hard and I get lots and lots of random requests like can you check out my portfolio, can you check out my logo? And I just I can't, I can't, I don't have the capacity to do it. It'll take me 20 minutes to do that for every single person to go through their pages and I just can't do it. I try. If somebody sends me an email, I'll try, because they've obviously gone to my website, found my contact details, tried a bit harder than just sending a dm in socials, but yeah, it is. It's really really tough. So, yeah, it's, it's well. It's a shame. I want to help. I really do, and I love this side of the business that I've gotten myself into now this education space. I absolutely adore teaching people's and passing on the knowledge and keeping people in our industry. Um, but it's just the case of my time. I can't find the time to do absolutely everything, so I've got to kind of you can't find it.
Josh Hall:You can't. You can't even make it with with with your level. I hate to get all coachy right from the bat, but it's like one thing I learned a couple of years ago which is, uh, how can I do better at going one to many-many, like the one-on-one stuff was just killing me. It's why I don't do many one-on-one coaching calls, or even in pro, like I have kind of hybrid coaching where I DM one-on-one but I haven't even got to the point where I'm like man, I wish I could have shared this with other people. So I'm really working on more one-to-many. So I don't know if, maybe eventually, if you kept track of a bunch of questions and tried to do them in a monthly Q and a I don't know if you're doing that for students or or what that looks like, but yeah I would I would definitely encourage you to think about how, what could you do one to many if you get a lot of the same requests or something, what could be done?
James Barnard:I guess like like a kind of like an, an interview with someone that is shared online, so something like a live or an instagram live kind of like, when you and I went on our instagram live and you talked to me, talked me through about how to go about hiring an assistant. That's a conversation that you and I could have just had privately, but we did it publicly and so many people got, you know, um, a lot out of that, and it didn't just help me, it helped a lot of other people as well. So I'm sure there's something we could come up with, whether it's like a paid community or something like that. I know you have one, I don't, um. So, yeah, maybe that's something I can think about yeah, I wouldn't rush into that for sure.
Josh Hall:I don't know if you want to be a community builder right now with everything else got going. It's a lot. But uh, the idea of you know, like just common questions and giving people a chance to do that, then maybe a VA categorizes them and then you could just say, yeah, we had like 13 questions come in about how to get design clients. We have 50 questions about how to, you know, start a logo designer, whatever it could be. I wonder if there's a world where that could happen. Anywho, we don't need to rehash our first conversation.
Josh Hall:James, you were on in 262. So definitely recommend everyone go back to that to kind of hear 62. So definitely recommend everyone go back to that to kind of hear. You know, even before you got to this level, how you started using social media. What I'm really curious about is how the heck you've balanced like this presence that we're talking about and the challenges that come with that and service work. Now you've been pretty open that you've been doing less and less service work and I know you're doing some more partnerships and brand deals now. But is your percentage like what? What's your percentage of service work time compared to social media time and brand service time. And while you answer this, I'm going to let my golden retriever in she's scratching. She just wants to hear your voice, I think.
James Barnard:Go ahead, go ahead. Uh, so I have the 50 50 rule, which is something that I got from my pal, jamie Brindle, who is a wonderful sort of freelance guru. He recommends spending half your time bringing in new clients and half your time on current client work. And the social media side of things for me is bringing in new clients. Really, that's the end game. Really, that was the. That's the end game.
James Barnard:Now that that has changed slightly over the past couple of years because the financial pie chart of my business is so different to when I first went viral on social media. Um, I now get something like I think a little over 42 percent of my business comes not from the general sort of client work. So getting into social media as a lead generator has opened up so many other doors for my business that now my financial pie chart is split in loads of different areas. So it's everything from client work, which is logo design and visual identity design for clients. Now I do get brand partnerships with other clients that use my social media as their platform and I'll partner up and make videos for people and get paid pretty well for that. Talk about that in a minute about how um, I'm trying to chuckle this.
James Barnard:Um digital products is another huge one. I've launched a couple of courses, like every other social media designer out there, trying to, you know, carve up a little bit of income from this platform that I've now found myself on, and I've launched an illustrator course last year. I've done a couple of other little mini courses about logo design and how to do client mock-ups for in photoshop for for clients and sold those on my own platforms and that's been very, very lucrative. And then public speaking as well, so going out to places like adobe max. I'm actually going to creative south in april, so flying all the way to columbus, georgia, to do a talk over there. So that's another little um door that's opened up for me. So using social media to bring in these um clients for my business has just opened up all these other little avenues and revenue streams for my business. So it's made sense for me to kind of spend more time on the social side of things and actually carve out a portion of my week to devote to making content for social media and videos.
Josh Hall:I think this is common too, just as a basic business principle. It's like when you get to a new level or a different level or I don't know how long you had been doing logo design up until the past couple of years, but I'm sure you get to the point where it's probably pretty fun to like switch up your revenue streams and do some new things just to keep things fresh, especially as a full blown entrepreneur like yourself. But I think what's cool about this is it's pretty common for all designers to where, like, you may do a service for a long time and then you realize this doesn't need to be like the main thing for me anymore. Two years ago when we talked, you were pretty even with 50% logo design, other design and then social media actually less than that, if I remember right. But now it's like you could still do the logo design because it keeps you fresh and it's probably content for you. It keeps you in the game.
Josh Hall:But I imagine what's? What's the pie chart now, time wise, are you doing like 10 logo or service work? Or how often? Like how much time are you spending doing service work? At this point it is less.
James Barnard:It's not. It's not a lot less. I I love the logo design side of things and actually it's. I've come to a bit of a realization that, yes, the teaching side of things is very, very lucrative and and quite rewarding, but I really do love helping people. I do love doing the client work and I go to places like you know, adobe Max this year and I'm just surrounded by people whose work is incredible and I I realized quite quickly like the social media side of things is fantastic, but I want a body of work behind me. I want to leave something behind. I want to leave like a legacy of like design work, that actually people that I'm proud of, and I want to work with bigger and better clients. That's where I get my fulfillment out of this career.
James Barnard:You know, actually just making social media videos the dopamine hit isn't there for me anymore. Honestly, like posting a video that gets like, you know, 3 million views, that used to be like game changing for me. I still love that feeling of getting, you know, my eyes on that, all those eyes on my content, but it's kind of not floating my boat as much anymore, like when I post a video, like there's a little spike of. You know, yes, that did really well. And then immediately I'm like so what next? So for me, the, the, the, the client work is where I want to kind of, you know, build this up. But I'm, I'm honestly, I'm, I'm again another inflection point in my business, like, I feel like I want to scale the client work more and, um, use the education side of things as a bit of a supplementary income. But I really do want to build this business and make it bigger and better.
Josh Hall:It's fascinating because, well, number one, even to your point earlier where you feel bad that you couldn't get back to everybody that shows that you are a heart led business and a heart led guy with with what you do, Like I can tell everyone. It's very clear. It's probably one reason people are so attracted to you on social media is you're not like this douchey influencer who is literally just like purchasing likes or something like you actually are purchasing content. That's super helpful and very cool, and I'm not even a graphic designer anymore but I love seeing that stuff because I know Illustrator moderately, but I'm like, oh snap, this makes you want to dive back into Illustrator. But all that to say like it makes sense that you're feeling the tug to continue with service work as opposed to just going for the dopamine hit to social media.
Josh Hall:However, I do have to say I look at your Instagram. I'm looking at it right now and that, to me, is a body of work. I mean, I'm not a huge social media guy like I. I much prefer to create long form content as my body of work. But I do have to say, like, I look at your social media and I think that is a that's pretty impressive. It's probably a different style of work, different body of work, but it's still a lot of work. You still put a lot of time in this video.
James Barnard:I've done something like 450 videos over the last few years, which is which is insane when you think about it. That's a lot of time to dedicate. Um. I last year at adobe max I saw sorry, the year before adobe max there was this creator called karen x and she did this talk, uh, called one for me, one for the algorithm.
James Barnard:So I know how to make videos that I know will go viral. It's usually this kind of format you find a problem within your software, you solve that problem with a unique tip or trick that no one's heard of before and you put it all to an absolute banger of a track and usually it pops off. So no dialogue. Those videos do really really well. They're kind of more appealing globally because there's no language barrier. You're just illustrating what to do with no dialogue and those videos do really really weirdly well and that's a great way to go viral. But it's not a great way to get followers because there's not that much value there. The people it's kind of like a um, a cheat code. Do you know what I mean like people? People actually don't get a lot from it. They might get a little tip or trick, but largely, if you just have videos like that. It's kind of hard to follow. So I like to intersperse that content with actual explainer videos and I get on camera and I talk and those videos don't do nearly as well, and I know they won't do nearly as well. Like I posted a video yesterday about sizing guides for logo design. So how to make a versatile logo is to make a logo that's the same width and height, so like a square or a circle, because it's more versatile and more spaces.
James Barnard:Obviously, that's not sexy content. No one really loves that kind of content on social media. It won't go viral. I think it's on like 40,000 views in the last sort of 12 hours or so, which isn't that great on Instagram, you know, with some of my following. But the people who love it are my current followers and people who are looking to get more out of design and actually learn about the industry and I love making that that kind of content. It really floats my boat. It's just not very kind of viral and doesn't lead to, you know, huge amounts of views on the video, but it's, but that's. That's kind of for me. Do you know what I mean? That's like that's not a video that I'm making for to try and, like, explode on social media. I'm doing that as kind of passing the knowledge on and actually getting um, getting fulfillment out of doing that kind of content.
Josh Hall:Yeah, I feel like in in your situation. The big danger are the vanity metrics of the follows, of the likes, and I've thought about this with this podcast because this podcast gets moderate downloads For a podcast in web design. I believe we are the top now If anyone searches web design podcast. We should be number one. You can try it out if you want to. James, Let me know. If you search web design podcast, we should be number one. You can try it out if you want to. James, let me know if you search web design podcast should be number one, or should be up there.
Josh Hall:This is on just on seo. There we go that. Or you could do it on apple or spotify, I think for sure on spotify we're number one because sometimes web design podcasts get into like web design stuff, like you know, design and code and stuff.
James Barnard:But yeah, you're the second organic listing on google there's obviously a sponsored one at the top. But there you go, and then the top one is like a listicle. You know the top 10 web design podcasts.
Josh Hall:So well done. I should. I should do an article on that, by the way, uh, so I say that to stay like we get very moderate, modest downloads on this, but anytime I'm feeling like gosh, I should. I should be doing more. I see designers like yourself have a huge following. I'm reminded this. This episode will probably get anywhere between 1,500 and 3000 downloads. That's not that much.
Josh Hall:If you look at you know something like your following, but everyone listening is almost pre-qualified to be like somebody who's very committed and very serious podcast listeners by nature.
Josh Hall:There's a bunch of stats on how, uh, revenue and income often translate to to podcast listeners and how there's a large percentage of podcast listeners who are business focused and doing pretty well, interested in buying stuff. So, all that to say, I would much rather have a dedicated fan base and dedicated listenership, largely who are customers or going to be customers, or who are serious and committed, versus the vanity metrics of likes and I'm not saying you're going for that, but I do. I would imagine that's probably what you have to toil with. It's like how much of this audience and those kind of posts I imagine it's probably nice to have some of those where you get the three, 4 million views. But then it's like, maybe, maybe one gets 50,000, but it's like maybe those 50,000, this is something that's more in depth and maybe they will become a course student. So I feel like it almost has to get back to the goal of your, the goal of your content.
James Barnard:Well, there's a point to be made about like ownership of your audience there as well as, obviously, we're sitting in a week where tiktok has just been banned and then came back to life miraculously 12 hours later, and for a moment there I was looking at my us following on tiktok and working out how many followers am I about to lose because of this ban, and it was like 40 000 followers. I was going to be cut from my tiktok list, but there's a lesson in there about diversification of your audience. You you know what I mean. I've got a following on Instagram, I've got a following on TikTok, but my most valuable following is my email list, and it's not a huge amount, but boy are they like a dedicated, like targeted group of people that are interested in what I have to say, and they're also an audience that I can offer services to and sell things like courses, and that's hugely powerful.
James Barnard:So I was lucky enough to chat with a guy called Tom Ross last year who was the CEO of Design Cuts, which unfortunately closed this week, but he put some really great advice, by the way, about how to build an email list and how to create lead magnets and that kind of thing. So I've been working harder on that and also just diversifying where these, this audience, kind of finds me. So obviously the main social platforms, but I'm bigger on linkedin. Now I've got something like 30 000 followers on linkedin. I've worked really hard on trying to build that up. Um and, yeah, email and also a little bit of youtube as well, I feel like I'm yeah, not as much, not still not long form yet.
James Barnard:I just can't find the time.
Josh Hall:It's a different game. It's a very different youtube shorts as well.
James Barnard:I had a few videos hit um a million and it just spiked my follower account from there.
Josh Hall:So it's it's slow but it's getting there I was gonna say you have the content, because I'm repurposing everything I'm doing on Instagram on on shorts, with just little little quick tips and then interview snippets, like the snippet I choose from this episode, will go out on YouTube shorts and Instagram and Facebook uh, which doesn't do anything on real. So any uh, yeah, you could absolutely just go shorts first and then eventually start to sprinkle in some some bigger content.
James Barnard:Tom.
Josh Hall:Ross is the community builder, guy right.
James Barnard:Yeah, he does. Yeah, he was, he was, um, he's the design cuts CEO, but unfortunately they just announced this week that they've had to close. Um, yeah, it's very, very sad news, um, but yeah, he's. He's a wonderful bloke and someone I've chatted to a bit over the last couple of years and he's given me some great advice cool I gotta get.
Josh Hall:Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead I was just gonna say I gotta get him on because I know he's a big circle fan. I've seen his name around. I gotta try to get him on.
Josh Hall:But yeah, yeah I totally echo that advice too. I'm sure is what he said is like owning your, your, your, your audience, your email list. Even if it's super small, like you've already attested to James, it is so powerful to have a committed email list or committed group of fans or, you know, just followers. I think this is such an important message because anytime somebody sees somebody like yourself blow up the even. I've been experienced this for a long time and I feel like gosh, I should be doing something to boost the numbers. I have like 1600 people on Instagram, but you know what? I have 1600 people. A lot of them are my community members. A lot of them have been to my courses. Um, I just posted that we're going to be doing a live event and somebody literally joined pro just because they wanted to get access to the live event. So it just uh. It's a great reminder that it is so much about quality over quantity definitely, definitely.
James Barnard:I mean, I'm not gonna lie like, having, uh, a big following on someone like instagram does help when it comes to like to. If you eventually want to sell your services, there are ways to do it, and, um, it's just that you're casting your net a bit further rather than you know dialing in that. Um, like having like a targeted group of people that you know are going to like, buy from you. Just with Instagram, it's just, it's a bit of a wider spread, and if you do it too often on Instagram, people get annoyed, they get kind of fatigued with you trying to sell to them all the time. Um, people really just care about themselves, don't they? Do you know what I mean? They're looking to you to grow themselves as a person, and if they can get value from your content, then that's fantastic. But if you sell to them constantly, then it rubs people up the wrong way. So you've got to be a bit careful with it.
Josh Hall:Yeah, I think it seems like you're doing a great job balancing all that no-transcript audience.
James Barnard:Yeah, yeah, it's a bit of work. I don't post as much as I would like. I would love to do a newsletter like twice a week, but, honestly, making the videos client work, it is just me. So I'm back here on your podcast for more advice on how to scale this business, cause I'm struggling again. I feel like I feel like I need a team. Sometimes, when I'm like I'm editing a video myself, I'm like there's somebody else could be doing this for me. Why am I spending two hours doing this? I could totally farm this workout.
Josh Hall:We just also yeah. Oh no, please go ahead.
James Barnard:Also, I feel like I want to grow the business as well and I can only take on so many logo design jobs. Yes, I have an assistant now and, thanks to you, I have a wonderful lady called Beatrice who helps me out with things like logo exports. She does my presentations for me when the job is finished. She does brand guidelines, documents for me All the things that we were talking about parts of the job that I don't enjoy as much and somebody else can totally do. She helps me out massively with that. So that's been fantastic and shout out to Beatrice she's been my absolute rock for the sort of last 18 months or so. She's been fantastic. But yeah, I feel like there's other areas in the business that somebody else could also do scheduling, video editing um, you know, you name it the little bits and pieces. I mean even even more of the logo design side of things. I could bring on some more clients that way and take on more jobs and start a little agency.
James Barnard:It's just I, I'm. I love my lifestyle right now. Like we talked about last time, I have two young children. I love the fact that I'm here for every dinner time. Um, you know, it's, it's. It's a lovely life. We just went on holiday for a couple of days up to the up the coast here to to Noosa, and I did that Monday, tuesday, wednesday in the week just because I could. You know, if I had a job I would have to take that time off and it would account to my 25 days holiday in the year. But I cause I was between um the men's with a client. We just shut up the coast for a few days, and what a life. I feel like I feel bad about complaining about my life now, but you know it's, it's so great, it's fantastic. We live.
Josh Hall:No, it's brilliant. Um, I heard we, we. This is so timely. We just this week, at the time of talking to you, we had a guest training and web designer pro and it was all about scaling and how to to help your time and reduce overwhelm. And it was a really interesting stat or or a method, which is, if somebody can do it 70% as good as you, it's time to delegate. Yeah, and that one hit me. I'm like, ooh, that is interesting because I think, as creatives and I know you feel like this it's like I don't want to delegate something. When I'm the creator, I want to keep control. It's my thing, especially when it comes to logo design and something that has your name on it. But I can tell you from my experience and a lot of the students I'm overseeing who are scaling, if you can create the initial processes and systems and even creatively have like a kind of Barnard style guide that people follow and the types of design I mean honestly just your body of work, is enough to be like. These are the type of designs that we're shooting for. That's generally probably going to be enough to be able to get some help on that sort of thing, even video editing.
Josh Hall:I remember being really, really hesitant to hand off editing for this podcast, but I did a hundred episodes myself and then Nathan, my editor, came on board and reached out and said he'd be open to helping out. He's local, I knew him previously and I was like let's try it out. And he's just way better than me. He's way faster, he makes it sound way better. He has some sort of interface audio thing that makes it sound way better than anything. I know how to do so.
Josh Hall:It just showed me that I was pretty good at this, but it's so time intensive that, yeah, I wanted to focus my stuff towards a different role and more high level tasks. It doesn't mean that we're above repeatable tasks. It just means like you're the only person, james, who could do the client stuff, the high impact stuff, the brand deals, the other revenue streams you're doing. So I would say I mean the list that you just rattled off off. You can take the transcript from this if you want. That's like you're. That's your list right there to get off off your plate off your shoulders.
James Barnard:It's just, it's the barrier to entry. For me is the scary part, because, yes, there I have systems in place, but it would mean training somebody and investing that time into bringing somebody up to speed. And you know I, I, if something takes me like five minutes to do, why would I give that to somebody else? But that's not the point is. It's about over time those little five minute jobs add up, um, so yeah, it's, it's about kind of like investing that time now to save future me from having problems.
Josh Hall:You know, in the future and it's a one-time sacrifice of time for ongoing benefits.
James Barnard:Yeah, that's it. And look I. I turned 40 last month and honestly I'm I. I feel like I get burnout more and more and more now. Uh, I don't know if you can see the wrinkles on the on the video here, but I I'm exhausted. I do a lot of this myself and I've got two young children who are just. It's like you know how it is. It's insane. Our household is. It's very stressful that they fight constantly. I feel like I play referee half the time just pulling them apart. Um, so, you know, my personal life is is is beautiful, but also like it is full on. We are, me and my wife wife are like well in the trenches right now in terms of parenting.
Josh Hall:Tell me, so you know, tell me this, james, because I do want to say one. I'm so glad I didn't forget this because you just mentioned the time thing with your family. The really cool thing about scaling that I've found is that scaling doesn't mean that it has to be a stressful project manager and you're spending more time. In fact, you'll be shocked at how much time you'll get back when things are being done without you actually doing them. Again, there's a lot of work up front, but even if somebody stays on for a while and then leaves, if you have a system in place you can fill those shoes. But all that to say, scaling actually I think what a lot of people find out is it actually is the thing that is really the only option to free up time. I mean, the reality is, if you do anything else on top of what you're doing now, yeah, there's going to be a sacrifice in time or your mental bandwidth burnout, but the thing is it's like it all comes at some cost. So you got to figure out.
Josh Hall:I think in your situation it sounds like if things were cool and you loved where everything was, that right now and this was the game plan for the next five years, you'd be fine, but being that you want to do more service work, I'd say you have to make a change, and really the only change you can make is to automate or delegate and or both. I don't know how much can be automated. Here we go. James, why don't you just use ai to crank out logos, don't?
James Barnard:don't, don't say that, don't say that. Uh yeah, the old AI debate in our industry is a tricky one right now. I actually I use things like chat, gbt as like research tools. I think they're fantastic for that, like, if I have a question, I want it answering. Or let's say, I'm making a video on something like that has um, that that talks about a graphic design principle, and I want to remember like I need a citation for something I can use that. And actually even in my my public speaking gigs, I've done lots and lots of um work.
James Barnard:I spoke at adobe max for an hour last year and it was that's right yeah, it was a long session and lots of that um content needed, like studies to back up. Like, there was some studies that I talked about in my speech and trying to Google all that information was a real pain, and I use ChatGBT as like a research tool. Is there a study that backs up this concept and like, yeah, there's this and this and it's like, wow, that's really good. It's almost like the new Google, isn't it?
Josh Hall:It's an easier and better research yeah, people are using it as a google search. I still do quite a bit. Yeah, I'm like it's getting to the top, not even because I it's really easy to do for outlines and content creation, but also, yeah, as a searchability now.
James Barnard:Yeah, there's a new industry now isn't it like search engine optimization for ai? Like my friend jacob, who runs um, um the I forget the name of his business now, but he searched himself, or he searched who are the best brand designers um that I should be hiring right now, and he came up in his own chat GPT search. I think it was the pro version. So, yeah, how do you get onto those lists?
Josh Hall:Let's do another live. I'm going to put myself on the spot because one of my members said I pulled up. Can you chat? Gpt? Top 10 WordPress YouTubers.
James Barnard:Now I don't have the pro version of this. I'm not sure if it can access the internet.
Josh Hall:still, I appreciate you giving me a buffer in case it doesn't work? Top 10 WordPress.
James Barnard:Let's go top 10.
Josh Hall:Yeah, wordpress YouTubers.
James Barnard:Or.
Josh Hall:YouTubers.
James Barnard:Yeah, all right, here we go.
Josh Hall:Which is funny, because they don't even have that many WordPress resources. Okay, there's a list, am I not on it?
James Barnard:It doesn't look like it. Top 20. Can?
Josh Hall:you do top 20?.
James Barnard:I don't want to mention any of your competitors on your podcast.
Josh Hall:Oh, they're all co-opetition. I'm sure they've all been on the show at some point.
James Barnard:Number one was WP Crafter.
Josh Hall:Yep Adam.
James Barnard:Another one, adam. So top 20.? No, I don't think I don't think so.
Josh Hall:I wonder it was a different search. Well, I had a member send it to me and he was like dude, what did you do to get on chat, gpt? And I was like, oh snap, I didn't even think about doing that. I only shared that because it is a great way to to pull up. Wonder, um, I promise I'm not lying to you, james or everybody else. I, I thought it was WordPress.
James Barnard:Um okay, so it's Daryl Wilson, 30. Yeah, daryl's a big one. Tyler Moore, wp beginner. Corey Ashton, wp tuts, living with pixels, elementa and elegant themes. Yeah, I wonder one version of chat, gbt. Uh, the newer version that you pay for, I believe, uses more up-to-date access to the internet. Yeah, so I'm not sure I want to know how you improve your ranking on these lists.
Josh Hall:Uh-huh, here we go. Hold on, I'm going to share my screen with you, james, real quick. Okay, I just wanted to make sure you and everyone knew I am not a liar. I am here with truth and right there, number five on my end.
James Barnard:That's not coming up for me.
Josh Hall:Top YouTube channels for WordPress. Wow, number five on mine. That's interesting. I don't know, maybe that's state specific, so all that to say. You're totally right, chatgpt is kind of its own little search engine now, which is another added benefit. The really cool thing is ChatGPT is just using organic Google results and YouTube, since it's all controlled, so I didn't do anything separate to be on ChatGPT. Anywho, I forget what we were talking about, but uh yeah yeah, using ai, but uh, I would like to get to.
Josh Hall:Oh, this is great, man, I'm kind of glad you wanted to just chat about this because you know I love helping you and other folks. Scale, like what would be. I feel like you know what you want to do, but I think the question may be like, what's burning you out, or what's the most draining apart from just the obvious time? Like what would be if you could do, if you could offload three things? What would those be? Would it be editing? Would it be inbound, like, like, comments and DMS, what? What would be? Three things you would just love to not do all yourself.
James Barnard:I guess probably editing. The issue is is that I I my current workflow is that when I make a video I'm too impatient to let it sit there. Uh, I have to post it immediately. I just want it out there, and I very rarely bank up content or have the time to bank up enough content in order to sort of get like a week's worth of social media. Let's say I post three videos a week. I'm kind of down to like two a week now, if I'm honest at the minute, for me to do two videos is probably about four or five hours worth of work and I've got to dedicate that time and find a window in order to do it.
James Barnard:So what tends to happen is during the week I'll work in the mornings on my client work, and that's when I feel like I'm the most creative. I wake up in the morning and I feel like actually that's the time to do my logo design stuff. When I start to dwindle and run out of ideas and the creative part of me is kind of not there anymore, I'll switch to a video and I'll make a piece of social media content and usually from the afternoon after lunch till the end of the day I'll make a piece of video content, so I'll script it, record it, edit it within about two and a half hours and then post it straight away afterwards. That's kind of how it's worked for me at the minute. So for me to hire an editor would mean that I would have to kind of get a bit more efficient with that and actually bank a bit of content and come up with ideas. You know, create like maybe 10 ideas for videos and record all of the content and then send them off to an editor to have them all kind of batched on in one go.
James Barnard:Also, basically, the parts of the business that I enjoy the most, the ones that bring me the most money, and those are like things like course creation. I made a huge chunk of money last year from selling digital courses and my wife really, really helped me out with advertising. We did some Facebook advertising last year. Last year my business grew something like 35%, but also my expenses went up as well because I spent a lot more on on advertising.
James Barnard:So, putting the time aside to create those online courses but again, the last one I made, I did everything myself. You wouldn't believe like it was the first one I'd done. I set up the course website. So I went through Kajabi, set up all of the workflow, the email flows, um, recorded, scripted, edited everything myself and it's an hour and a half of content. So it's like making a movie and I did everything. I did everything on my own and it was like six weeks of solid work and it was completely burnt out by the end of the process. But now I have that thing on my you know as my, under my arsenal and I I can sell to.
Josh Hall:Do you feel proud of that? Do you feel proud of like you're?
James Barnard:I work really hard on that and I also work really hard on making it really tight and succinct and really to the point. So a lot of people when they sell courses or when people are buying courses, they look at like the volume of content and they'll see like, oh, this is a three hour video. Wow, look at the value I'm getting. Like I struggle with that a bit because some people's you know another person's three hours of content, I can say in an hour and a half or an hour and 15 minutes good for you yeah, and I love the fact that it's like tight knit and it's really to the point and each of the chapters are really broken down.
James Barnard:There's so much in there so I have people messaging me saying it's quite a short course for the price. I'm like if you don't like it, you can have your money back. But I'm telling you there's there's so much in there and, like my videos, I've gotten so practiced at making content that's under a minute and saying as much as I can in less than 60 seconds. You wait until you see my illustrator course and how much you're going to get in an hour and 15 minutes. But again, I did all of that myself. I scripted the whole thing, james can I interject before that?
Josh Hall:Such an important point? It's just like service work with design, like graphic design stuff. Clients if you were to tell them this is going to take two weeks or this is going to take six months, the price like if they can get it done in two weeks and it's going to be incredible, they'll pay even more for it. So what I've learned is the same thing with, with, with courses. I'm actually like you're hitting me uh right across the head with this one, because it's glaringly obvious to me that I need to cut out some fluff in my courses and tighten up my lessons. So that's my big push this year, as I'm getting to revamp, is shorter lessons, shorter lessons. And I thought the same thing. I'm like this course went from a 10 hour course to like a four hour course. Is it still as valuable as that? Yes, 100%, because it's a quicker transformation.
James Barnard:So I would almost say there's a caveat to that, though, justin, you got to be careful.
James Barnard:Yes, your course will be tighter and faster, but it's going to be harder for you to edit.
James Barnard:So at the minute, if you have a course where you're kind of just talking on camera and there's a lot less prep work involved, you can kind of talk about what you're doing as you're going through, and it's a lot less polished, but it's easier for you to make if it's like that and people still get the same information.
James Barnard:When you have to tighten your content, to really shrink it down and get it to the point, you need to script it, you need to edit it tightly, you need to have all of your b-roll in place to make that process as um you know, as fast as possible, and it's that is not easy to do. It requires a lot more prep work to tighten the course that much, to make it more to the point. So there's an argument for both there. You know, the fluffier, longer, whiffily, waffly kind of courses are a lot easier to make, and that's something that I feel like I should do if I'm going to get into something like YouTube is to go a lot less scripted, talk more off the cuff and create longer form content, just kind of on camera, explaining what I'm doing as I'm going through, rather than scripting everything down recording, chopping it up and then editing it into something a lot shorter.
Josh Hall:So that's true. That's very no, that's fair. That's absolutely fair. Um, it's kind of funny. I'm doing currently these like weekly quick tips and they're just real base like video with captions on them, no screen overlays or anything like that. But it took me longer to put four 45 second clips together than it would like a half an hour lesson. Yeah, one of my courses.
James Barnard:Just to that point, because yeah, trimming out cutting out every little bit of fluff I think it's a mark twain quote, isn't it? It's like I wanted to write um, I wasn't that. What's the quote? I want to write a short. I wanted to write a short story, but I didn't have the time, so I wrote a long one. You know, it's harder to make something shorter and succinct and to the point than it is to actually just like let a stream of consciousness come out of your mouth and press record and and then post it.
Josh Hall:That's easy are you familiar with, with Derek Sivers, the author.
Josh Hall:No so you would love this one, james. This is one of the books I go to recommend Hell yeah or no which is actually a really good type of frame to use for scaling, because you just get a really good idea of like, once you get to a certain point, what do you want to do? I show this, to show this. This book is like 100 pages, but I had him on the show a while back and we talked about that and he was like that book was actually 1,000 pages.
Josh Hall:And I spent way more time chopping out everything it didn't need to make it a succinct 100-page book. So yeah, point taken, point taken on that. It's a great reminder for me. Just because I'm shortening lessons doesn't mean it's going to be an easier course creation process. In fact, it'll be probably twice as hard, yeah. So thank you for that. Appreciate it, james. All right, that's a great point, though. What else? So? Video editing, any other things that are glaring to you, I guess scheduling, Scheduling and handling leads.
James Barnard:Um, I do like to control that, though, because I nearly lost my business at one point because I put my prices on my website and lost all those leads. So I don't know if you remember that story, and now when I get a lead through, it feels like it's a big deal and I want to kind of massage out, um, that business from that person. So I do feel like I still want to control that process, but I could, you know, hire somebody to help out with scheduling and lead management and handling of some of the leads that are for clients that don't quite have as much budget Like I have a filter on my inbound form at the moment. So if you go to my website and you want to hire me for a logo job, you go through a short questionnaire and one of the first questions is what's your budget range? And that will tell me immediately kind of the level that they're playing at, so that the ones that that select the higher budget range I'll devote more time to and give them a more personalized response.
James Barnard:The ones that are on the lower end and, honestly underneath my floor price, they get a templated email that doesn't take me too long to sort out. I used to automate that, but I do personalize them a little bit. It's just the ones that are on the lower end of the scale. That's a lot more templated Gotcha.
Josh Hall:Yeah, I feel like if you were to delegate any sort of design work, it would be that for sure.
James Barnard:The templatized type of thing, yeah, the things that don't require me to do, like things like mock-ups, presentations. That's what Beatrice is helping me out with now and that's fantastic. She does my Photoshop mock-ups, she does templates once the logo has been finished and they want to roll out a visual identity into something like business cards, letterheads, stationery, that kind of stuff. Beatrice helps me out with all of that because that doesn't need me to do it. It's a little bit more plug and play, but she's great. She does a fantastic job and it requires some stylization and she does a great job with rolling out what we've created. So we're working a bit harder and I'm I'm hopefully going to get her to help me a bit more with the logo design side of things I was just going to say have you asked her if she's interested?
James Barnard:and she's great as well because she kind of feels like, um, like I could be a bit of a mentor for her in that, in in that respect, and she can come on board with some client calls. So that's the plan this year is to get her more and more involved in the kind of ideation side of things and actually do a bit of the legwork up front with, like the research and some concepts for logos, and then I'll take on what she's done and just get it that last 10% to get it over the line and we can be a bit of a team there. And if that works then that's a really scalable format that I can use to take on more jobs and hire another assistant and build it up from there.
Josh Hall:The thing is for me.
James Barnard:I'm worried Sorry, josh, I'm worried that the time element is going to go. I like my lifestyle so much that I don't want to get too big that it requires me constantly on hand to put out fires and deal with client problems and that kind of stuff. At the moment it's it's, it's just about manageable. So, yeah, again, don't know what I'm going to do with this. Uh, it's really. It's really interesting and kind of exciting and scary at the same time. But I do know that the client work is where I get my most joy and leaving that body of work behind, and I feel like my work just gets better and better the more I do it, and I just want to keep going with that. I don't want to fall by the wayside, I don't want to stop doing the work. That kind of keeps me in the trenches, because the social media content follows on from that and I can use what I learned in the real world and teach others and build a business that way as well.
Josh Hall:How many logos would you like to do a year?
James Barnard:Well, last year I did something like 10, I think it was. The year before that it was almost double. So I've actually brought that down for two reasons mainly that I'm charging more per project, which is great and allows me to take on bigger clients do less of the work. Also, that the like. We talked about the financial side of um, my business the pie split in different ways. Now I'm getting more revenue from other parts of the business so I can afford to take on less design work.
James Barnard:Um and I I you probably compared to other designers, my process is a bit longer. When a client comes on board and I start a project usually takes around two weeks for me to come back to them with the first version for them to take a look at, and the whole process probably takes around a month. And I love it that way because it allows me to sleep on my own work. I have the time to actually take stock of what I've done, which then leads to higher quality work. The more I sleep on my designs and come back to them fresh the next day and look at them and go that's terrible what I did yesterday.
James Barnard:Let's start something different. It means that my work gets signed off faster and I did a talk about this at Adobe Max. It was called signed off, no amends. And building in this buffer with clients and giving me the time to work on these jobs means that the work that I present the first time is of much higher quality, and it's it's me. It means that the number of revisions that are coming back on jobs is much, much smaller, so I can actually turn over a bit more.
Josh Hall:Well, the reason I asked that is with your idea of, like, building a body of work. I do wonder, like is, is more than 12 a year even necessary for you, or would that be enough to feel like this is a nice body of work? One a month on top of everything else you're doing with your extended in-depth processes, seems like that would be a pretty sweet spot, I would think. I mean, is that, do you want to do more than one logo a month?
James Barnard:Probably not, to be honest, probably not. I think it's about volume of work, it's about quality and for me also, it's higher profile work as well. I had a couple of clients last year that were very, very high profile and one of them was to design a logo for a Las Vegas nightclub, which is the highest profile job I've ever had. It ended up falling through, unfortunately. I did a reel about this. It was a nightclub on the strip in Las Vegas but unfortunately they didn't convince the owner of the business to do the rebrand. They used me as a bit of an experiment to see what they could do with their brand. They paid very handsomely.
James Barnard:It was a great budget job job, but they didn't end up using it because of the legacy of the brand. It was just too old it's like 30 years old and we couldn't convince the um, the owner of the business, to change it. But you know, had that come gone through, that would have been a massive um, you know portfolio piece, and that's the kind of work that floats my boat when something's a bit more high profile and you know out there in the world already and it's kind of like a rebrand of something that's already established. I love that kind of stuff. So yeah, for me it's about attracting clients that are kind of um, you know, bigger and better and more high profile, I guess.
Josh Hall:That's it you just said. Said it, james you're building, building your portfolio out isn't a matter of building more logos. It's a bill about building better logos, bigger brands, elevating that to do something that is going to trickle down. So I mean, that's probably the the compass that I would do every like make all business decisions around moving forward. So I was originally going to tell you to like consider, you know, hiring beer interests more to do more and more logos for you.
Josh Hall:But I almost wonder if your goal is to do bigger and better than having a low end offer is not going to contribute to that goal. It's only going to make it worse. So I would, actually I'd probably raise rates even more. The one thing you could do too, I mean with your cost, the size of your audience. For if you wanted 12 logos a year, I I would actually be interesting to test this out. But I don't want to blow up your business overnight, your logo business. But it almost would be worth having like a starting range that is super high, to not even have to worry about funneling people in under a certain range. That way it's like look, this year you've and maybe you even say like I've got three spots open.
Josh Hall:Our logo design started, you know 15k or 20k or whatever the package is, and if somebody goes in there thinking like I want to work with james for 500 bucks, they're like, oh, 15 is where he starts. But then he look, they look at your social media. He's like, wow, this guy's got 600 000 followers just on instagram. Going back to the the benefit of having a huge audience, it's like, no, you're legit, like with the amount of inbound coming in. I. I almost feel like, in the essence of saving your time, keeping your lifestyle balance in place, working on bigger and better, the thought in my head is that you have to like have limited spots that are very high end, um, and you don't need the cheap logos anymore. I mean, maybe you'll do something for nonprofit or for charity, as a passion project, which would probably feel awesome, um, but I think I'm doing this year actually Awesome.
James Barnard:That's a big part of it as well as like doing projects that float my boat as well, and actually like I'm working with a couple of artists this year I won't I won't know names just yet, but hopefully we're gonna we're reaching out to a charity this year to do some work, um, for them and that's something that that's a passion project of mine.
James Barnard:I spoke to a guy called andrew hockerdale who's um he works with Creative South and he's done a few Adobe live streams and he dedicates so I think he dedicates a month out of the year to work on a project for himself and works his client work around that, to give himself the time in order to work on a project that's just for him, and I absolutely love that. I really want to do that. I want to find some time to work on something that isn't for clients and actually just does something to kind of you know like could be pro bono for a charity, but in that way it's, it's fulfilling to me and could be, could end up being rewarding, and the fact that it's pretty high profile I might get some news and media around it yeah, but yeah, that's interesting.
Josh Hall:Yeah, does that make, does that make sense, that idea of like the you know to me after, talking with you through this.
James Barnard:Yeah, it does.
Josh Hall:it does feel like, only because that's your goal. Your goal is to do one logo a month, probably on average, to do really high quality and, yeah, bigger, better brands in a way. So I think that's where you need to go. I think you need to go even probably more premium and have a wait list, like you have two openings right now. I don't know how often you stagger them or get started, which would change your sequence in your onboarding process, because leads instead of coming through the door and taking your time and doing a discovery call and you could probably cut off a ton of your time and free up a bunch of your time if you just weeded them out completely Again only because you're at the level where you can't do it now.
James Barnard:It just makes me nervous, josh, because I've been through this before where I put on, I put floor prices on my site and almost bankrupted my business because nobody got in touch for two months and had no cash flow.
James Barnard:Obviously, it's different now because my revenue streams are split and I've kind of diversified my income a little bit.
James Barnard:But you should be surprised about how little the social media matters to people who are just looking to spend money on creating a new brand for their business. And I get a lot of requests through for people that have less than a thousand dollars to to spend on this and I do turn them down um, but they, they still come through and I I don't know whether that's because of the way I'm marketing myself people think that they're still working with a freelancer. They, they can, they might be able to get away with um getting a logo for 500 quid. Fortunately, that's just not the case and I'm not quite sure what I need to do on my website to change that kind of mindset with people. A lot of people just don't value graphic design or value what a good logo is, and it's my job to sell them on that, but I can only do that once I've got that lead in and if I put the prices on, they just don't the leads destroy them completely.
Josh Hall:Can you sell the dozen people a year?
Josh Hall:keep this in mind a dozen people a year is your whales yeah, can you sell a whale on your website before or during the onboarding process with a contact form like could you create a few videos that really or maybe you have some on your instagram or whatever that talk to the benefit of logos and how this elevates brands and translates to revenue and retention? I wonder if there's a way you can almost prime that. What I'm curious the 10 people you worked with last year, how many of those started low in and you upsold, versus how many were like out of the gate ready to go?
James Barnard:Most of them out or out of the gate had the budget. If I'm honest, they kind of, and it largely depends on where they are in the world as well. I didn't work with many Australian businesses last year. I've targeted America as a lot of it and, like you know, the Silicon Valley, the startups they spend, they'll spend whatever it takes.
Josh Hall:Basically, Give me a hard number Out of those 10, how many were like qualified out of the gate? Probably eight, yeah, so you spent how much? How many leads came through that you nurtured and tried to talk to and eventually crept up to? You nurtured and tried to talk to and eventually crept up to so two out of the 10, so 20 of the leads that came through. How much time do you think you spent with all those people who never moved forward?
James Barnard:uh, to be honest, look, I, I get a lot of leads. I get something like probably like 10 to 15 leads a week, maybe more than that actually, but a lot of them are very sort of low end. So I don't waste, I don't spend a lot of time, you know, worrying about the lower end budget ones. The trouble is just I'm just my time is so stripped If I have lots of leads come through and I'll go back to them with the response. I'm really bad at follow up and I need to. I need to get better at this, like following up with those leads that haven't responded, um, but just so many come through that I'm always just handling the new ones I've got to. I need to sort my processes out, james, it's clear this is.
Josh Hall:This is not what you want to hear, but as a coach to a lot of web designers, some of my web designers are doing several hundred thousand, half a million some of them. They get to the point where they are like, oh, so clear about. This is where we start, or this is our average and that's it For you. What you just said makes it super clear to me that 80% of the clients you work with for logos and service work last year were really qualified. So can you imagine what, if what, have you brought those eight people in who weren't even nickel and diming you from the get go and just didn't even worry about the other two or all the other leads that came through? How much time would you have saved if you, if you had that, I really think.
Josh Hall:I think you should probably just have a, a logo range or a logo package that starts at doesn't even ask the budget, just, or maybe the budgets are different, maybe the budget is like 5 to 10, 10 to 15, 10 to 20 kind of thing, um, and then just you're weeding people out immediately before they even come through your ecosystem and it's and I. What's interesting is like, because you're such a, I love helping people. You're such a heart-led guy. I don't want to change that at all, but the reality is like you're.
Josh Hall:You're crafting your business around the like lowest hanging fruit yeah, it's kind of what I'm saying yeah um, and if you and the only reason I think this is really important is because, like you are burning out, you got a lot going on uh, maybe that's not fair to say you're burning out, but you admitted like you're tired, it's like.
James Barnard:It's like how sustainable.
Josh Hall:Is this something's got to change?
Josh Hall:so I feel like the couple things to me that are glaring. That could change is that process and just, you are full all in on quality over quantity and the good news is, dude, there's nothing to lose because you don't absolutely need all those and you know, even if you got five logo designs in 2025, but they're paying five grand more or 10 grand more, you're actually going to make more revenue, work less and have more time to really dig into those, and you'll have more time for the social media and more time for brand partnerships and a few speaking gigs. So I kind of feel like, as hard as it is, yeah, you got to drop the low hanging fruit, folks, and then maybe eventually, once you have a scalable system and kids are a little older and you have more time, maybe you could figure out some sort of template for logos. But you know, you know that's better than anyone, than anyone. Logo design and branding is so personal and and so custom, no matter what people try to use.
James Barnard:It's a trust thing as well. People trust you. It's part of the job is like selling in, that I am going to do a good job for you, and part of that is showing the old portfolio workbook. Another part of that's just speaking to them and listening to what they have to say. But, yeah, you're right, look, I feel like you and I need to take this conversation offline and I'll show you some of my financials and you can talk me through what to do next. This is like yeah, this is like inflection point time now, like I do need to. You're right, I am burning out because I'm trying to do everything and, even though we had the same conversation that you know two years ago, I'm just not learning from my own mistakes. Well, no, you did, man.
Josh Hall:You did James, like, look, you hired an assistant, yes, yeah, you hired a VA and she's killing it for you. She's doing more and more. So I think that was incredible stuff that you took, cause you were like the last time we talked and it's so funny, man, cause I just, I see, I see the scaler of me in you Uh, cause I was just like I don't want anyone else to do anything, it's my business, I do it all. And then you get to a point where it's like, yeah, you know it goes. There's a, there's a book called free time that I recommend in my scaling course and there's a quote in there that just hit me like a bag of scaling bricks and it is the only reward for doing everything in your business is burnout.
Josh Hall:Yeah, and that may be a great way to put a cap on this conversation. So, yeah, I hope this has helped. You know, I know we haven't come up with any concrete solutions, but we'll turn off recording here and talk some shop, but I hope this helps you, james, and others. Just taking a serious look at your business, serious look at the goal and the why. Like, what do you really want? And then the cool thing is you can craft everything around that. And then, once you get to your point James or other web designers who maybe have a good list of clients and plenty of recurring revenue you get to a point where you're like, yeah, this might be risky, this may affect this part of the business, but I don't need it and the few people who this is going to attract is going to is going to make up for that.
James Barnard:So, yeah, man, I have a podcast every two years and you just keep me updated on my business and you can be like my uh, my coach as we go through this and we'll keep everybody updated on how it's going.
Josh Hall:Heck yeah, man. Well, I appreciate you giving me a scaling testimonial for my course, so we'll call it even. You can just keep on sending me video testimonials, and I say I work with James Barnard. What?
James Barnard:a reciprocal relationship. I love it.
Josh Hall:Yeah, man. Well, dude, I'm super proud of everything you've done. Man, this has been great. Thanks so much for sharing, yeah, where you're at, and lessons learned and the hardships with this Real quick. Where should everyone go to connect? We have one final question, but where should everyone go to connect with you?
James Barnard:On my socials is at Barnard Co, so that's on Instagram, tiktok, youtube, and my website is Barnardco. If you want to check out the changes that I'm going to implement after speaking with Josh on this podcast, go have a look. But yeah, barnardco is the website. So, yeah, everything. You'll be able to find everything there.
Josh Hall:Yeah, we'll have everything linked in the show notes too for this one. My final question for you, james. I mentioned I have a member of ProBlaze who is starting to take off on social media. He is like a super fan of yours. He said that he was like I can't believe you had James on your podcast. He's like my hero. If you would, could you give Blaze a personal recommendation as he's growing his email list? If you could talk to yourself from you, know, five years ago or whenever you started on social media, what would, what would you tell blaze as he's managing web design work and growing his social media? What, what would be a piece of advice you give him at that stage?
James Barnard:I checked his profile after you sent it to me and it's very good. Uh, his video editing is really tight, like um, I feel like he's really got that down. I guess, just give value back to your audience wherever you possibly can I know he does that already Skip your content and then, yeah, like we said before, 50% of your time should be spent on doing this and the other 50% of your time should be spent on the client work. Is he a web designer by trace? Is it like UX web?
Josh Hall:design, yep, ux, web design and then he just started doing social media because he enjoyed posting content. He's doing the right thing.
James Barnard:I don't think I need to give him any advice. To be honest, he's doing the right things, needs to speak to. He looks like he's teaching other UX designers, but he's secretly getting clients that are going to use his services, and I like the way he worked in some of his designs into some of the portfolio pieces as well. That's really clever. It's exactly how you should do it. If you ever want to showcase your own work, use your work and the examples of the educational pieces that you do. So every design that I show on camera, I did it. So if I'm showing like this logo, you follow this rules. That's one of my logos. It's like a massive portfolio piece. So, yeah, he's doing the right thing. Just keep at it. Stay consistent.
Josh Hall:Killer. I'm going to share this with him. It's going to make his day. Thanks for that advice. Great advice for everybody. Great advice for me, as I'm thinking about social media stuff.
James Barnard:So, uh, james, this has been awesome. Thanks, man. We'll talk a little, a little off recording here and uh, next round you'll be a scaling machine, yeah, but see right, thank you.
Josh Hall:Ah well, I hope you enjoyed this one, friends. Again, I kind of wish we would have just kept recording, because the website audit we did, which I did follow up on with a an overview video of what I did in his audit, and we looked at some of the changes he made. Again, that is going to be found at the show notes for this episode joshhallco slash 366. So check that out. I really am excited to hear how this one helps you, particularly those of you who are utilizing social media to get clients as your main lead generator. It's not for everyone, but if there's a shining example of how to do it right, it is James. But, as you can see, it takes a toll sometimes on other areas of the business. So it was an honor to be able to consult with James here and give him some coaching advice to help him prioritize what needs to be done, to quote unquote, move the needle forward again, based off of his goals. So I can't wait to hear your thoughts on this one. Drop us a comment, joshhallco slash 366, and be sure to head over to barnardco, follow him on whatever social media you're active on, Buy his courses. Send him a note.
Josh Hall:Support James. He is one of the best in the biz. I consider it an honor to call him a friend, and it was really cool chatting again, so I can't wait to hear from you. Josh hallcom 366 is where to go after this. Stay subscribed, because there's another graphic design legend coming up on the podcast soon in the form of chris doe, so that's going to be a couple episodes out. So, needless to say, stay subscribed and I'll see you on the next one.