How Paige Brunton Brought Together a Talented Web Design Team
When Paige Brunton started building websites for small businesses in 2015, she never expected so much demand. The only way to keep up was to eventually launch a course to teach clients how to build their own websites, teaching them how to design them just as she would have done for them. What surprised her even more was the number of students who didn’t just want a website from her; they wanted her career. Though she hadn’t set out to teach others how to become web designers, her business naturally evolved to meet that growing interest. Now, Paige is a go-to expert in web design business management. From empowering people to create beautiful websites to mentoring them on how to run their own design businesses, she now juggles multiple roles. Fortunately, she has a team to help. We were curious: how did Paige know it was time to bring on support, how has she built such a reliable team, and what systems keep everything running smoothly?
Can you walk us through the roles and responsibilities that make up your team today?
I do all of the content creation for the business because I truly love it. I also create new offerings, update our courses, manage the admin and finance, and manage the team. Our other full-time team member manages the operations of our launches and affiliate program. Our contractors do customer service, content creation assistance, and video editing. We have a bookkeeper as well.
When did you hire your first team member?
My very first hire was a friend I hired to help with customer service in the inbox during a launch. To this day, I still absolutely hate dealing with emails, so that was really the first thing I wanted to get off my plate. When I only did custom web design services, I ran the business solo. When I started taking on custom projects and running courses, that’s when I very clearly started needing help.
What signs or challenges made it clear it was time to hire support?
Building my first course was an absolute time commitment. I spent three entire months taking on no client projects—purely building out the course and all the launch materials and hosting our launch event, as well as our usual weekly tasks for creating content, sending out newsletters, and more.
After I launched it for the first time, I went back to doing custom web design projects while also managing the course and students, doing Q&A calls, and creating evergreen funnels. It got to the point where I truly just didn't have enough hours in the day.
What questions should someone ask themselves before taking that leap?
I would start with what drains your energy the most—what is the task that you procrastinate doing because you really aren't good at it or don't like it. I would outsource those things first, assuming they're not a super high dollar-per-hour type of task.
What characteristics do you look for in a team member?
I look for someone who absolutely would be lit up and bring so much joy by the work, whatever that work is. If it’s organizing and managing large-scale projects like our launches, then we need someone who gets a ton of joy from organization and has naturally been doing that their entire lives. If we're looking for someone to manage our bookkeeping, then they have to be someone who loves that sort of process-oriented, repeatable work and is highly detail-oriented. If we need someone to be our affiliate manager, they need to be a social butterfly.
What factors help you decide between hiring a full-time employee versus working with a contractor or freelancer?
A contractor or freelancer is a lot easier to get set up with, especially if you're working with people in different countries. That is normally most small business owners’ go-to.
If, however, you want a team member fully dedicated to your business, that's when hiring someone as an employee makes more sense and is worth going through the legal and administrative hoops.
There are certain things in the business that I absolutely don't need full-time support for. I don't need a full-time bookkeeper or video editor—I simply don’t have enough work for them to do. I just need someone who does a couple of hours a month for those roles. So, it’s very obvious to me that this is someone I'm going to work with on a contractor basis and who serves different business owners at the same time.
That can also be beneficial, too, because this person is going to stay very up to date with whatever's happening in, say, the bookkeeping or tax law world. They're going to be keeping up with it for not just me, but a number of other clients, too.
When I'm deciding if someone should be a full-time employee or a part-time contractor, a big factor is how many hours do I actually require of this person? Do I need someone who is super specialized in this one thing, like a bookkeeping platform? Or do I need someone who has the ability to do many different things in my business for a great number of hours?
How do you train new hires to match your brand standards or client expectations?
I've found that people either have similar standards to you or they don't. And there's not a whole lot you can do to change that.
Do great work yourself, hold yourself to a high standard, and make it clear you have that expectation. The vast majority of people will see the example of quality produced and meet it.
What motivated you to launch your flagship course, Square Secrets™?
Launching Square Secrets™ was purely a solution to being a fully booked website designer. I had blogged so consistently that I made my way to the top of the search results for the term “Squarespace website designer.” This led to an unbelievable avalanche of client inquiries, which, as one website designer, I could obviously not handle—even if I started booking out months and months and months in advance.
That's when I realized I needed a better way to run my business.
I considered starting a template shop; I considered becoming a web design agency; and I considered creating a course.
To me, a course felt like the best option. People have told me I have a good way of explaining things simply, and I enjoy teaching others. I never intended to teach other people how to be website designers. My only intention with Square Secrets™ was to teach people how to build their own websites that would be the same high quality as the ones I build.
Of course, it ended up taking an unexpected turn, and I realized I accidentally attracted many other people who wanted to learn the skill of website design to then become a website designer themselves, which greatly changed the trajectory of my business.
How has growing your team helped your bottom line?
There would be many things that wouldn't be possible if I didn't have team members.
If I were the one managing the inbox, doing our bookkeeping, running our launch events, and editing our content, you would maybe see two videos a year from me as opposed to a consistent weekly video. Additionally, our course wouldn't reach nearly as many students without the help of our dear and beloved affiliates, and managing our affiliate program takes many hours and commitment from my team.
I don't know how to put an exact number or figure on it, but our business has been able to grow significantly because I am able to spend my time doing more scalable tasks—and because I'm not spending my time trying to understand how to bookkeep VAT in Switzerland or solving the reason someone can't log into their course, for example.
What’s been the biggest hiring mistake you've made? What did you learn from it?
I've made plenty. I would say the number one most useful thing that we do now (which we didn't do previously) is when we've narrowed it down to one or two top candidates, we find one contained project that we can have them do.
How people interview and how they actually work can be two very different things. Paid test projects have been really important.
What systems or processes do you rely on to manage your team effectively?
When you have team members, you cannot function as an online business without a project management system.
We have a reputation as a company that runs flawlessly without ever having meetings—we have maybe one meeting per quarter to recap our launches. In terms of the actual day-to-day of organizing, running, and managing the business, it all goes through Asana.
We have a process for anything that is done repeatedly, and we have tasks and project templates that we use. Those tasks are assigned to different team members, and the entire business runs smoothly.
When building a team, how do you balance keeping overhead low while still paying fairly?
This comes back to my point on making sure that you hire out the lowest dollar-per-hour tasks first. When web designers are at capacity but want to take on more clients, many immediately think to hire another web designer. However, if you’re spending hours on bookkeeping, admin, or customer service, or fighting with tech platforms or scheduling weekly emails, it is so much cheaper (per hour) to hire out for those much more basic tasks than it is to hire someone who is a really skilled website designer.
Look at all the tasks that you’re doing. It's worth tracking your time for a week or two to figure this out. Then, rate all of those tasks by which ones you enjoy the most and the least. Next, give a rough estimation on whether each responsibility is a $100/hour task or a $20/hour task. Get rid of the $20/hour tasks first.
I don't love managing and coordinating all the contractors, but being the coordinator of the team is my role. The fact I’m still doing it is because I know it's a lot cheaper to hire someone to schedule my emails or edit my videos than it is to hire an online business manager to run, operate, and manage my entire team.
In your opinion, when is the wrong time to hire?
I see people get into a pickle most often when they’re drowning in their business and dropping balls left, right, and center, and the business is generally very disorganized and there are few processes, systems, and tech in place.
Then they think, “When you're busy and overwhelmed, that's when hiring help makes sense.” But if you bring someone into a mess, it's just going to get messier. You want to have your business operating well day to day before you bring someone on.
Have processes, systems, and, at a bare minimum, use a project management tool before you bring someone into your business.
How do you keep your team motivated and aligned with your vision, especially when working remotely?
I am exceptionally lucky that the audience I've built is looking for flexible, remote online work. I hire a lot of my email subscribers and past students, and I think that the alignment and motivation inherently comes with that.
They are very bought into the mission of the business. They understand who it is that we're serving and that we do an exceptional job of serving them because they're quite literally serving themselves and they understand the ideal client.
That has been a bit of a business hack to hiring people who are naturally motivated and aligned—just hiring from my audience and students.
What's the first internal process you'd recommend every small web design team build?
Your web design process! If you're not already doing one client at a time in a quick turnaround time, I could not recommend it highly enough.
Your web design process gives you so much peace in your day-to-day life and allows you to truly serve your clients so well, particularly when you just have one project to put all of your energy and attention into as opposed to five or seven projects at the same time.
If you're curious to know exactly how I run and operate my two-week project process, I have a free client process template, which details exactly all the steps.
If you could only give one piece of advice about building processes from Square Secrets Business™, what would it be?
One of the biggest complaints that website designers have is that once they get to the feedback and revision stage, it ends up dragging on for absolutely forever because their clients ask all of their friends, family, dog, neighbor, child, everyone, for feedback—and they all have an opinion. (And we know that often those opinions can be very contradictory and can take a really long time for the client to gather.)
My best tip to keeping your projects on schedule is to set up your process so it doesn't even allow clients to crowdsource opinions and feedback, while still offering them a better client experience. For example, offer unlimited revisions in one week, rather than three rounds of revisions over an indefinite period of time. Complete any revisions within 24 hours, and then ask clients to send anything else they want revised.
Because clients get as many revisions as they want (within this set timeframe), they are eager and motivated to send their revisions quickly (without crowdsourcing). It also means you can get projects done on time, which clients love and adore.
Key takeaways
Here are some of the most valuable lessons from Paige’s interview:
Expand your team before things get messy or you become totally overwhelmed
Hire contractors for tasks that don’t require full-time support, and hire employees for those that do
Employ a project management software, especially if your team is remote
Give potential team members a project to test their compatibility and skill
Look to your existing audience or network for collaborators and teammates
Allow unlimited changes to clients in a short window of time to avoid additional rounds of feedback and delayed timelines for projects
Want more?
Check out Squarespace Circle, Squarespace’s program for professional designers and web design agencies. Along with exclusive content, discounts, and other perks, Circle brings professionals together from across the globe to exchange advice while connecting with new clients and collaborators.
