Time is money, save time & save money

Now that I'm back at work, since the boy has got his place in Nursery, I have taken a shine to checking in with Linkedin for a quick gander every day.  I usually do this with my first cup of tea, somewhere between my Spider Solitaire puzzle and checking the latest from the BBC news app.

I was intrigued the other day by a quick post which suggested that when one purchases something, they must choose between two of the following attributes (as all three didn't exist); Good, Cheap and Fast.  I argue that although it might be rare, there are definitely places where you can find all three and not have to make that choice.

Since thinking about this, I have decided that I would share my own little secret of how I am able to provide all three to my clients.  As the title suggests, it's no real secret that if you can save time, you can save money.  But saving time doesn't necessarily mean 'cutting corners', it may just mean finding a more efficient way of doing something.  So with this in mind, being more efficient, can save time, which can save money but for the same value of product.

I make WordPress websites, these are basically pre-built using lots of files which are hosted on a giant computer in the sky.  You fill the database attached to the files with a bunch of content, and hey presto, there's your website which the world can see.  The prices of these website vary from something like 'free' to 'thousands', and quite rightly so too.  The free versions are not necessarily a 'bad' product, they just don't have all the functionality that a 'better' website might have.  But if 'free' is your budget, then why not start there?

The ones that I build are £500, and here is why.  From the 10 years working in corporate finance departments I got pretty good at making spreadsheets.  If there was one thing I learned from these days, apart from how to make a spreadsheet, it was that 'transferrable skills' are more valuable than you will ever really know.  My transferrable skill is to work out how to make something more efficient.  In the simplest terms possible, I copied and pasted the code from the wordpress files, popped them into a spreadsheet, and used the spreadsheet to build the websites.

What this means in reality, it takes me two days (16 hours) to build a fully functioning, populated and pretty wordpress website.  I could bore you with the details of how I came up with my hourly rate of £25 per hour, but assuming you have better things to read today I'll leave that for another post, so two days comes to £400.  The extra 4 hours is me allowing for client time, which could be general communications, guidance of content, training for 'diy' updates and sometimes a little general marketing advice.

If I were to build a wordpress website (or any website in fact) from scratch now, it would probably take me at least a week.  And before anyone gets upset, if you can build a website from scratch in this time that's probably just because you are better than me.  I don't have to be the best at what I do, I just have to be the best at being me.

So you see, I save my time, to save my clients money, to make sure their customers see something 'good'.

Be efficient, be cost effective, be great!