We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rhami Aboud a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Rhami thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Often the greatest growth and the biggest wins come right after a defeat. Other times the failure serves as a lesson that’s helpful later in your journey. We’d appreciate if you could open up about a time you’ve failed

On December 1, 2021 our Project Manager resigned and gave us 0 days notice. This was obviously not the ending we wanted for 2021.

This put us into a tailspin and we had to band together to pick up his slack, while also searching for a new PM to join the team. For me personally, this lead to a challenging 2 months as I had to perform my typical CEO duties + some PM duties + HR/hiring duties.

Going through this experience was tough but it taught me some valuable lessons: in order to run a successful business you need to minimize risk as much as possible. For me the greatest risks associated with running a business are human-based:
1. Your employees can leave at any time & it’s inevitable. My lesson: streamline, automate & productize (if you run a service-based business) your processes as much as possible so that you don’t need to rely on high-level individuals to create great work for you. Finding & hiring high-level employees is much more difficult & expensive than finding lower-level ones, and it took me 2 months to find a PM to replace the one that left. Trust me, it was a LONG 2 months!
2. Humans make mistakes: everyone makes mistakes, so going back to my previous point of streamlining/automating/productizing your processes as much as you can is vital for this reason. The more your processes rely on automation then the less errors will be made.

With this in mind, we are going to be pivoting our business significantly this year. In the past we’ve focused on creating “Ferrari” websites: each site was 100% custom-built from the ground up and took 2-3 months to create. We are shifting to making more “Toyota” websites: we will be productizing our offering more to enable us to streamline the process of website creation and are hoping to cut our fulfillment times by 60%.

Now this does not mean that we will be providing a lesser offering to our client. Our clients are SaaS companies and they want one thing: more sales. It doesn’t matter how they get that. We will still be providing them a beautiful, conversions-focused website to get them more sales & I would say that the shorter fulfillment time is a huge value add! You can start getting leads/making sales from your site more quickly.

Sometimes life hits you hard with what seems like a punch to the gut, but you have to remember: everything is either a blessing or lesson. So when life hits you like that, look for the lessons you can take from it to get stronger.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name’s Rhami and I’m the CEO of Arch Web Design! We help SaaS Companies Build High-Converting Websites To Increase Sales + Drive Traffic.

It’s been a crazy journey over the last few years. I had been working in the corporate world for a decade and had enough of it, so I decided to bet on myself and start freelancing. At first I was struggling, as most people do, but over the years I started to figure it out and was eventually able to start my own Agency.

When I was working in the corporate world, I was living in Canada but decided to move to San Diego as soon as I quit my job (what better city is there??), and since then I’ve been able to achieve my dream of traveling around the world whenever I felt like it (minus Covid lol).

My goal in life is to be able to help people on a fundamental level, and some of the causes I care most about are: homelessness and childhood hunger. As our business grows and becomes more profitable, I will be incorporating an element of social impact that will help one or. both of those causes that I just mentioned.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

BY FAR the biggest piece of advice I can give is to niche down as specifically as possible! I know this is generic business advice, but I promise it is a game-changer.

When my business did this, that’s when we started growing significantly.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Sometimes you just have to trust your gut. For a long time I was relying too much on other people’s advice (mentors, coaches, employees) when I knew that’s not what I wanted. And I did it anyway.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.archcowebdesign.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/rhami_ax
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archwebdesign
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rhami