The beginning
Skyward was founded in June, 2021. The founder, Dan Spratling (That’s me!) had been working as a freelancer and operating as an open book for the past year, and the demand for freelancers who businesses could connect with was overwhelming.
In just a year, I’d built up enough work for more than just myself, but I was losing the work/life balance I’d valued so highly when I started out.
But an idea was forming.
After working in agencies for years, I’d seen first hand that this isn’t how they operate. There’s a huge disconnect between the personal connection that freelancers can bring, and the larger scale results agencies offer. Somewhere along the way, people turn into corporations, adding layers of bureaucracy, hiding away trade secrets, and working their staff to the bone.
Businesses were crying out for a change.
Skyward was created to allow me to expand this idea and help more clients succeed while treating our team the right way. We’re only starting out, but have lofty aspirations! Our goal is to inspire other businesses on our journey, by showing them how we’ve achieved our success.
We closed out our first year with £170k ($200k) revenue and a 28% profit margin.
Redefining agencies
Most agencies suffer from the same problems:
Feast and famine - Scaling up when in high demand leads to inevitable panic when demand lowers. This creates a stressful environment where there’s either too much work, or too little, reducing the quality in services provided.
Closed minded - Every agency I’ve worked with are very secretive about their process. This leaves clients in the dark and guessing how things will work. We’re upfront about how we work, sharing our processes on our blog and working through plans together.
Never locked in - We believe that a client’s website (everything used to build it) should be theirs to own. We make money through the services we provide, and we retain our clients through our high quality of work, not shady tactics.
Value Driven - Our results speak much louder than our words. We can sell our services but what really matters is that we’re always doing the best work we can.
Our goal is to show that agencies can be better.
Growing intentionally
To avoid from slipping into the usual feast and famine cycle most agencies face, we’ve instead decided to grow intentionally. This means we’ll only add to our team when it’s sustainable to do so, not just because we’ve had a spike in demand.
This will lead to better results in the work we produce by knowing our limits, a more efficient business as we’ll have better understanding of our resources, and more secure jobs for our team.
A proactive approach is always better than a reactive one.
Redesigning Skyward
In the spring of 2022 we began redesigning Skyward’s website. The first website we created was a quick release, so when it was time to do a redesign, we worked through the exact process we would take our customers through.
We started identifying our different types of users and understanding their goals, and how we can associate those with our own targets.
This led us to creating the site you see now, driven by the results we achieve (something every user wants to see), with different paths for different audiences to learn more about Skyward.
Here to help
Our core goal at Skyward is to bring better results to everyone we work with without compromising or creating a stressful environment for our team.
This means helping everyone we work with, to the best of our abilities.
If you’re not sure what that means for you, reach out to our team or continue reading!
We’re incredibly proud to be independent, as it means we can continue delivering our best work on our own terms for years to come.