Collaborate With Clients and Reach Project Deadlines Ahead Of Time

I really enjoyed the creative process of building websites and my clients loved the beautiful and result-driven websites I created for them.

And even though I was initially very much undercharging for my services, I was still growing month over month and soon enough I started building a team around me to help keep up with the demand.

As my team and I were taking more and more projects, things started to break at the seams.

Projects were taking longer than they should, clients were not complying with the systems I tried to implement and were reaching out to me for every little thing, through every channel they saw fit.

I’m talking emails, phone calls, video meetings, face to face meetings (Before COVID), Whatsapp, Facebook messenger and one guy even mailed me the content for his website as an envelope to the office with 20+ printed pages, including a printed version of his logo for us to use. 🤦‍♂️

Things started to spiral and I was working really long days and weekends to keep up dealing with clients, managing my team and keep feeding the beast.

But the worst thing is that between project delays, waiting for content and design approvals, follow up on clients and prospects and just simple misunderstanding between the clients and the team – The profits eroded until they were completely gone!

All this work and I had nothing to show for it at the end of the month…

After a couple of years of trying, quite literally, EVERYTHING, and asking myself one question – “Why?”

I realised that while I was a great web designer and digital marketer for my clients, I wasn’t an amazing service provider.

I mean, I did get the job done, but sometimes the process was pretty painful, for the client as well as for me and my team. By the end of the project, we were all feeling tired rather than energized for the next steps of getting the website to start working for the business and the potential of serving the client for years to come.

Many times, without thinking about it, I pushed the responsibility over to the client and sometimes even blamed them for not doing what I needed them to do, believing they were just being lazy and not serious about getting the results I knew I could get them.

Even threatening them with contract clauses, expecting to get paid the full amount, even the project was delayed or didn’t get to its final usable stage (“You didn’t provide the content so I’m delivering the website with Lorem Ipsums as per clause 14.6 of the contract”).

This wasn’t fair to them or the team I was responsible for.

I decided to make a change.

I shifted my mindest with 1 mantra in mind “I will consume ALL of my clients’ complications” and make sure they have the tools and knowledge to take this journey with us, as we’re transforming their digital presence.

Now that didn’t mean just throwing multiple tools at the problem or forcing them to log in to client dashboards or project management systems which overwhelmed them even more (I know because I also tried that).

I turned to my team and told them that we needed a way for the client to visually point at the different parts of the website to tell us what’s up. This will also give them the clarity and context that they need when they’re working on the content for their website – A task that is very much foreign to their day to day activity.

This is how Atarim was born. It was our little secret and quickly we saw the results of this mindset shift, to the point when I stopped speaking to clients altogether. Unless it was for selling them on the next stage. My team was doing all the work and their energy and productivity were off the charts.

Which is when I decided to bring our solution to the market.

This was 2 years ago. Now, we’re helping 5,000+ agencies and freelancers serve more than 120,000 of their clients through the platform, with some unbelievable results!

Working with thousands of agencies at different stages allowed us to keep expanding the system and automate pretty much every aspect of the work I used to spend hours every day doing within my agency and I have a feeling you’re still doing it manually yourself!

Atarim is a collaborative platform for web agencies and freelancers that systemizes and automates the work with clients and internally within the team.

From project delivery and management, client communication and collaboration and internal team management and optimization – Atarim tackles 86% of the time it takes to deliver a website project to a client, the service delivery and scrapes away days and months.

Allowing the web agency or freelancer to reach the project deadline on time, without any back-and-forths or waiting for their clients to do their part. Taking Control Over Your Agency’s Website Projects, Team & Client Collaborations.

Now here’s the catch…

In order for our platform to work for you, you must implement it within your business. We integrate into your existing tools if needed, but for the clients’ side, we will help you remove all of the complexity and give them the clarity they need to complete their tasks and to understand the value of what you are creating for them.

As I said, it’s a mindset shift. It requires us, as service providers, to take full responsibility for the client’s experience. In the same way we do when we’re building the user’s experience inside the websites we build as web creators.