Ask HN: How do we take our business to the next level?
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An old friend and I run a tiny (just the two of us!) web agency. We do a lot of work with non-profits and small businesses... mostly traditional website builds, but some software work as well. Our skill-set is primarily design & code, and we've always just sort of wung it when it comes to sales & marketing. This pays the bills (sometimes just barely, though usually we do pretty well), but we both feel like we want to take things to the next level.
We sort of find ourselves stuck in this cycle where we move quickly from job to job to keep cash flowing, and as a result are never really able to deliver the caliber of work we both think we're capable of. I guess what I'm saying is we want to be making the best work of our lives, and feel like time/budget constraints are keeping us from being able to do it.
One obvious solution to that is higher prices per project, but the clients we're working with are almost always on extremely tight budgets. That being the case, we feel drawn to attracting bigger clients, with more realistic budgets, but don't know how to break through to that audience.
Almost all of our sales come from word-of-mouth leads, and if our goal is to find a different type of client, we feel like we need to do something different, but don't know what that thing is.
Anyhow, hopefully this isn't out of place being posted here. Just looking for some answers.