I had 23 projects at once...here's how I got out of it

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Transcript

Setting The Scene And Newsletter Tie‑In

The 23‑Project Crunch Hits

Two Paths: Overwork Or Scale

Why Solo Designers Resist Teams

The Interview Series Strategy

Meeting Jonathan And First Test

From Small Tasks To Full Pages

Time Zones And Overnight Progress

Full Sites, Client Comms, And Trust

Josh Hall 0:00

Hello, my friend. Welcome into another solo episode here. We are continuing on for a little while with a little uh well joshy time. I guess that's the the the term that has has gone over pretty well. I got some good feedback on that from guys and gals alike, and even my mom liked it. No, my mom didn't mention it, but that's what we're gonna call it for now. A little joshy time here. I wanted to share with you in this one, which is based off of my most recent newsletter. I'm sending newsletters out every Friday at noonish Eastern. Go sign up for that with the link below, or you can go to joshhall.co slash newsletter. This one is about when I had 23 projects at once. Now, if you've been through any of my courses, you may have heard me talk about this, but I wanted to expand on more specifically how I got out of this great problem to have, but nonetheless, it was a problem. And I want to take you back to February 2018. I was at that point a proud solopreneur. I had been running my business at that point for eight years or almost eight years, and I was very proud to wear all the hats to be a solopreneur. I had dabbled, and by dabbled, I mean, I really mean the term dabbled with hiring out small bits of development and web design work. I had some people in my sphere who um knew some development stuff that I didn't know and were graphic designers who I had kind of sent some projects off to, but I didn't really have like an official contractor team or support system behind me. So I I did have a little bit of experience in in dabbling delegating. That sounds like a book. Deleg dabbling in delegating, but I didn't do it like ongoing or consistent. And this is the point in my business and in my career when that all changed because of the like compounding nature of building my business up for eight years, getting a lot of ongoing referrals from clients, my personal and professional network growing, the amount of like marketing seeds that I had planted in the months and years prior. And I think because the timing of the year, this is fed, this was February, which I don't know about you and what you're seeing right now, because coincidentally, or not coincidentally, this is coming out in the beginning of February. But I found that February tends to be a big month in like all industries. Um, generally, January, right after the holidays, businesses are like they're not quick to move on like big marketing. Sometimes they are. And I do have some Web Center Pro members who have had nuts in January's, but I think that's not the norm. Usually businesses need a few weeks to get into the flow of things, to get their budgets in order, and then plan for Q1 and Q2, especially. So I've always found that February tends to be a great month for a business boom. And that is exactly what happened because of all those things. It was just one of those times, and maybe you've been in similar seasons, or maybe you're there now to where it's like, what in the flying freaking heck happened? But I like everyone said yes all at once. Again, it's awesome because depending on your business model, you get a cash influx, it feels great, you get a lot of confidence, but on the other side of all that is a shit ton of work. So, um, and if you're like me and you are a very proud solopreneur, the only way to get out of that, well, there's two ways to get out of that. The first way is to just work like crazy and basically kill yourself. The only problem with that is if you work like crazy and almost kill yourself for the period of a few weeks or a couple months, no one says that the pipeline of future leads is going to dry up, meaning you could continue to get a lot of work over the next few weeks while you're trying to play catch up, unless you go with like a booked-out model and you just stop working with new clients for a couple months. That's an option, but it's not always the one I recommend. The other option is you can scale. But before you get scared, because I know some of you just got a little sweaty right there, I'm here in this audio newsletter entry of Joshy Time to encourage you and empower you with my experience because I'm here to tell you you can scale your way. Sounds like a good course, doesn't it? Um, you can absolutely scale in a way that suits you and your business. Because to me, and I'll be completely honest, my I was very averted to becoming an agency. I did not want to have 20 or 30 employees and payroll and overhead and extra taxes and expenses. I just really, because I'm a lone wolf in my work, or that's kind of my natural state, is to just do it all myself. And I think a lot of web designers fall into this category because we're techie and we we're problem solvers. So a lot of business owners are like, I don't even know how to turn an email on, so I'm gonna hire that out immediately. As web designers, we're used to just figuring stuff out, which is a double-edged sword because it's great to be able to figure stuff out, but the problem is you can figure everything out. So you're not gonna delegate anything until you absolutely have to, or you get to this type of situation like me, where you're just completely bombarded and there's truly just no way to get out of that. Um, I do want to say, with these 23 projects, they were not all massive website builds, but they were all projects that needed their own project management thread. I use base camp for that. So I essentially had to have at least 20 some base camp threads because I consider generally anything that's gonna be 10 or maybe five to 10 hours its own project. If it's gonna be at least half a day, it's gonna be a project that needs some oversight. So that was where I was and where I begrudgingly started to scale. And what I'm gonna do in this one is actually share literally how I scaled and got out of that. And there's a um, there's another level of complexity in this because to top it off, our first baby, Bria, was due in April. So I was two months out from being a first-time father. My wife is in her third trimester. We're trying to prepare for having a baby, and I'm absolutely positively swarmed with work. And these weren't like I'm ready to move forward. It was like they paid bills, like they paid the proposals that were out. Now, as I mentioned, I was very leery of scaling, but I had kind of reached this point where again, I just I could not see another way out. I was not about to work 90 hours a week with my wife being in our third trimester, her third trimester, and us about to have a first baby at the first time. So here is exactly how I got out of that. Here is how I scaled my way. It actually starts with an interview series that I did. So this is a challenge that we did in pro last year, and I just can't believe more people don't do this. Um freaking do it. It's it's called an interview series, and you can do it in a variety of different ways. But for me, what I did was I interviewed, I had just started my YouTube channel prior to that. I interviewed nine web design Divi specific business agency owners. And I interviewed them. It was kind of like my first taste of a podcast, except it was not ongoing. It was just like a timed, I called it an interview series. And some prepers members of Pro have done this and done a really good job and got some leads and some clients from this, by the way, because you can do this with your personal network, professional network. You can do, you don't have to do this like in the web design industry. You can do it to get more exposure in your local market, local market, or your your business out there. But I interviewed nine Divi specific web designers and posted on my YouTube channel. And the cool thing about this was I had a growing YouTube channel, but because I did interviews, every interview that I released, I think I did one a week for nine weeks, I had them share it with their audience. So every well, every one of these Divi web design business owners, and some of them were kind of like like Tim Streifler was my first one. He owns Divi Life. They were they had audiences of their own. It gave me like a huge boost of exposure, which is why I recommend doing an interview series. If you're a member of Web Designer Pro, go into the challenges section and you can watch the interview series and you can still do it. We're not doing it live together now, but you could still do it. So that is what I did. And I'm saying that because it got me a lot of fresh eyes. And in one of those interviews, I had I was talking with the the guys at Artillery Media, um, Jake and John. Well, John was the one I talked to, who actually Jake's gonna be coming back up on the podcast here soon because they're managing 500 plus maintenance plans now. Wild. Anywho, back then, uh John told me I have a junior web designer and he's awesome. And I was like, dude, I need to get a junior web designer one day. I told him I dabbled a little bit, but I, you know, I had planned on eventually. No, because I was pretty busy at that point, although the swarm had not come yet of projects, but I knew I was like primed and ready to start to enter those waters. And I actually launched that series in January. So talk about timing. This is crazy. January, I launched that series, which you can still find live. The newsletter for this, the written newsletter for this, has the link if you want to see that series, because it's still on my YouTube channel. And one of the fresh sets of eyes was a new web designer named Jonathan. And after that interview, he reached out. He sent me a lovely email that said he was a fan of my tutorials and he was getting into web design. He has experience in different design areas and he really likes development and he was new with Divi. And he basically asked if I was hiring and interested in sending out additional work, and he's like, I'd love to be that guy for you. I'd love to be your junior web designer. And he asked if I was interested in any, you know, sort of mentorship role for him. So, right leading up to this swarm of 23 projects, I had actually, I don't know the, I don't remember the exact date on this, but I did give him almost like a test project. And this was a paid project. I do recommend doing that. I gave him a very low-risk, low pressure little test project. And I remember it was a footer icon, like a custom footer icon that I could not figure out how to line up right with CSS in the other icons that I had using Divi. So he did that and he knocked it out of the park. And that gave me enough proof. And I do remember I paid him, I think it was$20 an hour. It was only like a couple hours, and he killed it. So it gave me a little bit of confidence to say, okay, well, you did that. Here's a couple other things you could do. And in the middle of just dipping my toe into these scaling waters, I get 23 projects all at once. Now we had like, I think I probably had like eight or nine at that point, but again, it was just like everybody wanted their sites ready. It was February, it's booming. So because of Bria coming soon, again, I was kind of like forced to scale. And luckily, I had just opened the door with a uh a junior web designer who was Jonathan. I call him JD, so you'll hear me call him JD a lot. Now, I want to share with you exactly what I did as far as my path on hiring him because it we did move fast. The first few steps I'm gonna share with you with you here were very, very fast because I was I was forced to. Um, but the little I have like seven steps I'm gonna share with you here. Some of these did take longer as he got more comfortable and I got more comfortable with him, and he started taking more roles in the business. But just know that we did move very, very fast. So it can be done depending on your situation. But he essentially went from like cold emailing me asking if he could have an opportunity to work with me to being my full-time designer in really just a few months. And here is how that path went. As I mentioned, it started out with him seeing my interview series and reaching out and me just publicly saying I'm gonna be probably, you know, I'd like to have a junior web designer one day. And then me giving him one small task, not a bunch, no job description yet, just one small task. I told him what I need done. Here's the tool stack, here's what needs done. Um, he I think he actually offered to do it for free if I remember, but I was like, I wanted to pay him for his time. It was super reasonable. It was 20 bucks an hour. So he killed it. The next step, which is step step number three, is we went from one little piece of the website to sections of pages that I had already started. I remember I was working on a balloon magician site at that time. Um, shout out to Perry and he uh PY Magic, that's what it was. I remember um I was doing the about page, and he had a really he wanted to make the about page incredible, just naturally. It's you're hiring him as far as a balloon magician who's gonna come to your house. So uh I was working on it and I didn't love it. So I was like, you know what, Jonathan? What do you what do you have? Think, you know, think about this. What would you do? And he killed it. He absolutely rocked this about page. It was like about slash FAQs, did some really good graphic stuff and just a really good design. So that gave me enough confidence to give him full pages to design. Now, at this point, step four, I was still doing almost every other aspect in the business, but especially when it came to like about pages or contact, or maybe I would do a home page and a service page, but then he would fill in the other pages. That's when I felt comfortable with him just rolling with it. And we got used to working together and had a nice little system going. Side note, I'm in Columbus, Ohio. Jonathan is actually based outside of Melbourne, Australia. So at this time of year, the time differences are really, really like polar opposite, which is tricky if you want to do calls, but it's actually really cool when you're hiring because you can do your work and get a task list set up. And then he was doing work overnight. So it was my first experience of waking up the next day and I'm like, oh my gosh, work is done. Like the, you know, I would normally do be doing this over the next couple of days, and Jonathan did it last night. This is amazing. So, step number five, it led to me feeling comfortable with him doing full websites. And this is where this process, you know, the first four steps went like in the matter of weeks and a couple months. These next few steps happened a few months after that, to where once he became really um affluent in Divi and really nailed down his design chops and was learning more and more about development in CSS and my systems and processes. Um, I hadn't even created courses at this point, so I didn't even have my processes really dialed in, uh, or at least written down. It was all in my head. But we had a really good system with that. Then I felt comfortable with me doing the sales, the onboarding, the initial strategy, and the design concepts. And then Jonathan would actually design a full website from there. And a few months after that, we got to the point where I realized I'm kind of playing middleman and I'm just being right in the middle of Jonathan asking me questions and me relating it to the client, the client asking questions for Jonathan, to where I was like, you know what? I think I feel comfortable with you talking to clients. And this is one thing when you're hiring, by the way, do not rush into having your contractors or team talk to your clients. Especially if you're like me and you have a lot of heart in your business and you care deeply about your clients, you need to make sure there is a very, very strong amount of trust before just having your clients talk to one of your contractors. Because even if they don't mean it bad, if they're not talking like you, they're not familiar with the brand, they don't have your personality, they may say something off-handed or something that really sets your clients off or does not reflect on you well. Um, so you want to be very, very careful about having contractors talk to clients directly. But we got to the point where I was like, I'm absolutely fine with him, basically stepping into more of a project management role. So that's what he did. He designed complete websites and step number six, he started handling client feedback and revisions. And then we finally got to the point, probably I'd say if I remember, maybe eight to nine months in, I felt, you know, maybe around eight to nine months to a year. I actually got to the point where I was able to just do sales call and then the initial design and strategy ideas, and I would just leave everything else to Jonathan. And then I would swoop back in at the end of the project, unless I was needed as creative director and any questions or to step in at any point. It was a lovely system. And that's it. That is that's the path to how I hired my first junior web designer who did become much more than a junior web designer. I share this in my course, Scale Your Way, but I I recommend you create a role chart in your business. And your head's gonna be in every role at first, but when Jonathan went from junior web designer, he became like main web designer. And then he was like web designer slash developer. And then with this path here, he was designer, developer, and project manager. And then he was like project manager and like project lead. So he was fulfilling like multiple roles by the time that he essentially was like a full-time worker for me, basically. So just remember the path to hiring that I found worked really well for me was to keep it very small, one step at a time, low risk, low pressure, low level delegating. And then as you build trust with somebody and rapport with them, and I will say too, one thing that's really important is to find out what they're interested in, make sure they're enjoying the role. You can expand from there and you never know what it will lead to. Because some people will be fine just doing the work and building your business, and they just want a task list to do, and that's fine. But some people are driven in a different way to where like they want to help grow the business or they want to take on more roles or do more than just design. So this is where it really is, you know. My course called Scale Your Way is that for a reason. You can scale your business your way. But the best way to start is to start small. So that's exactly what I did. Now, there is a lot more I want to teach you about this if you have not gone through my course. There's things like where do you find people if you don't do an interview series? Where do you hire? How much do you pay them? Do you pay a fixed hourly rate? Do you pay by project? Do you pay percentage? What are the average costs for junior web designers and developers and project managers? How do you create a job description? Do you need to have SOPs? How do I know what to delegate first? Well, there's a lot of stuff I want to teach you. And I'm really, really pumped to let you know that I'm going to teach you all that for free. And it is in my free scaling training, which I'm going to be doing for the upcoming 2026 Designer Boss Summit. It's called Level Up. And a lot of the talks are all about how to level up your business. My talk is scaling. This actually is just pulled from one piece of my training. So I took a lot of time to expand on it here, but um, the training is really going to help you, and it's completely free. Again, it's the Designer Boss Summit. Have you never been to that summit? It's one of the best in the business. I'm going to be speaking on Monday, this coming Monday, which is the uh ninth. Monday the ninth is when my scaling training is going to be going live. And then I will be doing a QA after the training on Monday evening. So if you're listening to this in time, then jump in. It's completely free. The link is below, or you can go to joshhall.co slash level up to sign up. Again, completely free. And I would really, really, really recommend taking advantage of all the other presentations that are going to be there to some incredibly successful designers and brand designers and web designers who are sharing behind-the-scenes stuff to help you level up. So it's very aptly named. And I hope to see you there. We're going to expand on again where to find where where to find um subcontractors, how much to pay them, how to do a basic job description, figure out what to delegate, what to automate. And I'm really, really excited to help you scale your way. Now, if you unfortunately uh check this out after the summit is complete, the good news is I have my scale your way course. And man oh man, am I happy I created that course because it has been helping people at, you know, it's what I needed. It's what I needed when I was completely slammed. Although I actually recommend going through Scale Your Way, and a lot of pro members will tell you this too, because it's one of the most talked-about courses in pro, especially folks who get to a scaling level, is and they'll back me up on this. You want to ideally do this before you think you need to scale. Because what you don't want to do is like speed scale. You don't want to be rushing around to try to hire and then like stress somebody out who's going to work with you. So I really, really recommend going through that. Well, if you're catching this live, go through my free training and then come into Web Center Pro and then go into my full course. But at the very least, go through scale your way and do it before you think you need to scale. Because when you need to scale, shit happens fast. Shit happens fast in the scaling world. So I want you to be ready. So you're not hustling through my course and then rush scaling, what I call a speed scaling. Yeah. So we want to avoid that. So anyway, joshall.co slash level up is how to get the free training for my scaling tips. And if you just want to dive into my full course, I'm not going to stop you. I want to help you scale. And you can jump into Web Designer Pro and go through the course. And I promise it's going to rock your world. And I would love to hear from you on how it helps. So, all right, friends. Well, I hope you enjoyed this one. This is literally, I mean, that's how I got out of it. That's got how I got out of those 23 projects. Of course, there was a lot more in and around that, but I mean, the big way I got out of that is I started to scale and I gave Jonathan more and more. And I didn't even talk about this, but as many of you know who have followed me for a long time, when Bria was born on April 9th, we spent 56 days in the NICU, the newborn intensive care unit. How did I get out of that? Scaling, because I had Jonathan. I was like forced to just give him as much as he could handle, and recurring revenue with my maintenance plan. So those are the two things that helped us get through that season. So scaling is freaking awesome, guys. If you're afraid of it, I just want to encourage you by saying it's awesome. You can do it your way, you can do it slow. It does not need to be this overbearing thing. It will free you up and it'll be the first time that you feel like your entire business is not on your shoulders. And that's awesome. So great stuff, guys. Again, this was from my recent newsletter. Go to joshhall.co slash newsletter to sign up for the written version of this. I do hope you're enjoying these audio solo jossy time episodes. If you are, please let me know. I uh am a I need what my love language, one of them, is words of affirmation. So I don't like as much as I like being a lone wolf in my work, I don't like not knowing how stuff is being received. I thrive on hearing wins and successes and your feedback. So email me. Go to joshhall.co slash contact to email me and let me know if you've been enjoying both the newsletter and the solo hits every week. It's kind of fun to dive into this a little more. And um, in the nature of it being a audio newsletter, uh, I'm gonna maybe I'll share what's ahead too, if you're interested. Next episode, next week. Well, the summit is Monday, so sign up, joshhall.co slash level up. On the same day, my next podcast episode's coming out, which is somebody who scaled very fast. Uh, not everyone's gonna follow this wild man's path, but Sam Sarden, he is the local SEO king in Web Designer Pro. He spoke at our Web Designer Pro con event in 2025 about how he grew his MRR and scaled his business with growth plans with SEO. And he did a live training on it, and it blew everyone's minds, and it was super transparent, and it was freaking awesome. And that's what he's gonna be sharing about. And it's actually it's not an interview, it is the full live training that he did in person at our event. So there's a whole different energy to it. I really think you're gonna like it. So, and you'll learn a lot from Sam. So, check that out. That's next week. Um, and there we go. Speaking of Pro Con, we're just two months over or two months out from ProCon 2026. Web Designer Pro members, if you have not got your ticket, we have 13 left out of 50. And I've really only done a couple pushes, so I will be doing a final push here. I imagine those are gonna sell out by the end of February. So if you're on the fence, you got to get your ticket ASAP. And if you're not yet a member of my community web designer pro, jump on in. Now is a great time to join, and you can get a ticket and you can meet me in person and meet everyone else in person. It's gonna, it's much more worthwhile meeting everyone else, but I'll be there too. And I uh can't wait to meet you. So it is time if you're ready. Great time of year, too, because things are hopping in pro, things are on fire right now. And and by fire, I mean uh money, money fire is just coming in for members. So we want to help you too. All right, my friends. Hope you enjoyed this one. And uh, I'll see you at the summit next Monday, DesignerBoss 2026, joshhall.co slash level up. And uh anything else? No, I think that'll do. I'll see you next week for another episode of Josh A Time.