Thinking of Selling Your Web Design Business?

For web designers and small agencies

We’ll take care of your customers. You keep getting paid.

If you’re a freelance web designer or a small agency and you’re retiring, changing careers or simply don’t want to deal with websites and support anymore, talk to Fruitcake.

We can take over your customers, websites, hosting, email and ongoing support.

You don’t need hundreds of clients. We’re interested in portfolios of all sizes.

Depending on the portfolio, we can offer an upfront payment or an ongoing share of the customer revenue.

Confidential. No obligation. And we won’t contact your customers unless we’ve agreed a deal.

Why designers are stepping back right now

The pressure is rarely the design work. It is everything stacked around it. Hosting security, PHP and plugin updates, SSL renewals, accessibility expectations, data protection questions, and clients who now expect an answer the same day. For one person that is a full time maintenance job that only gets noticed when something breaks.

There is a second reason, and it is simply time passing. A lot of people who started building websites in the early 2000s are now at the age where they want to stop. They have twenty years of loyal clients and no obvious person to hand them to.

Why selling a web design business is so difficult

Most web design businesses are not really businesses in the way a buyer usually means it. They are one person, a laptop, fifteen years of goodwill and a hosting account nobody else understands. There is no team to hand over and no process document. There is you, and there are clients who trust you.

That is why the usual routes do not work. A broker wants audited accounts and a management team. A larger agency wants the staff, not the smaller clients. And the honest truth is that a portfolio of twenty small business websites paying a modest monthly fee is not interesting to anybody who measures deals in millions.

It is very interesting to us, because it is exactly the work we already do. We look after hundreds of small business websites every day. Taking on twenty more is a Tuesday, not a transformation.

Your options when you stop, compared honestly

There are really only four things you can do with a client book, and only one of them pays you anything.

None of these is wrong. Closing down is the right answer for some people. But it is worth knowing what you are giving up before you choose it.

Who this is for

• You are a retiring web designer with clients you do not want to abandon
• You are changing career and need a clean exit that does not leave people stranded
• You are a small agency winding down, or dropping the web side to focus on something else
• The support and hosting side has become a chore you no longer want
• You have inherited a portfolio you never wanted to run in the first place
• You are still enjoying the design work, but not the 9pm emails about a broken contact form

If any of that sounds familiar, you probably already know the hardest part is not the money. It is the feeling that you would be letting people down. That is the part we are here to solve.

What we take on

We can take the whole relationship or just the parts you want to hand over.

• Websites. WordPress, bespoke builds, page builders and older hand coded sites. We have seen most things.
• Hosting. We move sites onto our own secure hosting with SSL and daily backups, at our cost, not the client’s.
• Email. Mailboxes and domain email are usually the most fragile part of a handover. We plan it properly and move it out of hours.
• Domains. Transferred or left where they are, whichever suits the client.
• Ongoing support. The calls, the tweaks, the content changes and the 9pm emails. All of it.

If you want to sell website hosting clients but keep designing for a handful of favourites, that works too. Plenty of these conversations end up as a partial handover rather than a clean break.

Selling WordPress clients

Most portfolios that come to us are wholly or partly WordPress. If you want to sell WordPress clients, the questions we will ask are practical ones: what is on the sites, who holds the licences for the premium plugins, how old the builds are, and whether anything is running on a version that needs attention.

None of that is a problem. Ageing WordPress sites are normal and we are not going to use them to talk the price down for the sake of it. Most of them we will rebuild on our own platform at our cost, so what we need to know is what the site does today, not how tidy the code is.

What is a web design client portfolio worth?

Nobody can give you a figure from a web page, and anybody who does is guessing. What we can do is show you how the number is built, so you can work out the shape of it yourself before you speak to anyone.

Almost all of the value sits in recurring revenue, not in past work. So the starting point is simple arithmetic on what your clients pay you every month:

• Count the clients who pay you on a regular arrangement, monthly or annually
• Multiply by what they actually pay, not what they were quoted years ago
• Turn that into an annual figure

Twenty clients paying £40 a month is £800 a month, or £9,600 a year of recurring revenue. That annual figure is the number every conversation starts from. One off design work, however good, adds very little, because it does not repeat after you leave.

What then moves the number up or down is how dependable that revenue looks to whoever takes it on:

Notice what is not on that list: how modern the sites are, how tidy the code is, or which platform they were built on. We rebuild most sites anyway, so an ageing portfolio is not a discount.

The one thing that genuinely reduces what a portfolio is worth is waiting too long. Every client who drifts away while you are putting off the decision takes their recurring revenue with them.

How we pay for a portfolio

Every portfolio is different, so we do not publish a formula. There are two shapes a deal usually takes.

• An upfront payment. A single sum for the portfolio, and you walk away cleanly.
• An ongoing share of the customer revenue. You keep receiving a share of what those clients pay, month after month, without doing the work.

Some sellers take a mixture of the two. Which suits you depends on whether you want a clean line under it or an income that carries on. We will talk you through both honestly, including which one we think is better for you.

What happens to your clients

This is the question that actually matters, so here is the plain answer.

Your clients stay online and keep a website that does the same job, with hosting, SSL, daily backups, CMS access and real human support from a named person at a family run agency in Cheshire rather than a ticket queue. Our own packages start at £39 a month, so for most small business clients the change is modest and the service is better.

Being straight about this: in most cases we will need to rebuild the site on our own platform. That is what lets us support it properly, keep it secure and keep it updated for years, rather than inheriting somebody else’s stack and hoping. The rebuild is at our cost, never the client’s, and we work from the site they already have, so nobody is starting from a blank page or writing their content again. Most clients end up with a newer, faster site than the one they had.

What we will not do is lock anybody into a long contract as a condition of the handover, or use the introduction as an excuse to sell them things they do not need.

You can read what our existing clients say on our reviews page, see the kind of work we do in our portfolio, or read our case studies to see how sites change hands and carry on.

Confidential from the first conversation

A web design client book is a sensitive thing to show anybody. If word gets out that you are selling, clients get nervous and some of them leave, which damages the very thing you are trying to sell.

So, clearly: the conversation is confidential, there is no obligation at any point, and we will not contact your customers unless and until we have agreed a deal. If we talk and nothing comes of it, we will not approach the people on your list afterwards. That is not a courtesy, it is the condition on which you are letting us look at your business.

How it works

• An informal chat. No spreadsheets needed. Tell us roughly how many clients, what they pay and what you want out of it.
• A simple summary. We ask for an anonymised list: what each site is built on, what it pays and how much support it takes. No client names at this stage.
• An offer. Upfront, revenue share, or a mixture, with the reasoning shown.
• Agreement. Short and readable, covering what transfers and what happens to the money.
• The handover. We write to the clients together, in your words first. Technical migration happens quietly in the background.

Most handovers take a few weeks from first conversation to finished. A small portfolio can be done inside a month, a larger one takes longer because we move clients in batches rather than all at once. Nothing is rushed and nothing goes out to a client without you seeing it first.

Why Fruitcake Media

We are a family run web design and digital marketing agency based at Glasshouse, Alderley Park in Cheshire. We support more than 400 businesses, we answer our own phones, and we have been doing the unglamorous long term support work that portfolios like yours need for years.

We are not private equity and we are not a roll up. We are buying clients because we want to look after them, and because looking after small business websites well is the entire business. You can read more about us or see our packages and pricing to judge for yourself what your clients would be moving to.

Common questions

Let’s have a quiet conversation

If you are thinking about stepping back, it costs nothing to find out what your client book is worth and what would happen to the people on it.

Call 01625 724284, email david@fruitcakemedia.co.uk or send us a message through the contact page. Mark it confidential and it stays that way.

Start a confidential conversation