Page 99 - DMGT521_PROJECT_MANAGEMENT
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Project Management
Notes
Case Study Low-budget Guide for Web World
n the Web world, hearing businesses and freelancers alike complain about low-budget
projects is not too uncommon. Let’s say that a local coffee shop needs to update its Web
Ipresence and contacts you for a redesign. It also requires a blog so that it can announce
new events and so on. However, during the course of the first meeting, the client mentions
that they don’t have a budget.
Being the inquisitive business person that you are, you say, “Well, we work with budgets
of almost any size. What price range were you thinking of?” The owner of the coffee shop
reveals that he has only $1500 to spend on the website. Thinking it would be a waste of
time, you walk away.
This is where our design studio found ourselves. We had potential projects all over the
place, but the budgets were all smaller than we thought we could handle. In the Web
world, demand for small websites is up. There are always start-up companies and small
businesses around that need some form of a Web presence. And, as a Web design community,
our job is to answer those needs in the most utilitarian way possible.
We began questioning our business practices. We knew that there was money to be made
on smaller projects, but it wasn’t until we sat down and did some simple math that we
realized the business opportunity we had been missing.
Here’s the simple premise on which we began to transform our business: if you turn away
10 to 15 small projects a year at $1500 per project, that’s declining between $15,000 and
$22,500 every year.
Any amount of money adds up over time
Our company was a start-up business once, too, and it still is. Perhaps we were delusional
in our belief that big projects grow on trees. We were struggling to find work. It became
clear to us that we needed to take a serious look at our business practices, our development
and design processes, and ourselves. We needed to find a way to make money. Let’s take
a few minutes to discuss how we overhauled our operations and started making a living
off of small projects.
Contd...
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