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A carefully curated portfolio can add value to your WordPress agency since it demonstrates your skills and experience. Plus, it can speak to productivity levels, client satisfaction, and more. But what should it include?
Well, you can showcase your best projects, highlight diverse industries, and include testimonials. These things will turn your portfolio into a highly persuasive tool, which you can leverage to drive up the sale price of your agency.
In this post, we’ll take a look at the reasons to prepare a portfolio for selling your business. Then, we’ll share six tips to help you curate a portfolio to attract buyers. Let’s get started!
The importance of a portfolio when selling your agency
There are various ways to convince buyers that your WordPress agency is an attractive investment.
Typically, what buyers are looking for is a strong financial standing, a healthy amount of recurring revenue, and a variety of client accounts. But it’s also important to demonstrate quality work.
A portfolio enables you to showcase the skills and experience of your team. It’s also a great way to flex how efficient your agency is, and how well your business can tailor services to meet a broad range of client needs.
On top of this, a portfolio gives a good impression of your communication skills, project management abilities, and work ethic. Plus, it enables buyers to see the main industries where your experience lies.
This can help buyers determine whether your business can support their future goals. For example, they might be looking to expand into new markets or specialize in a niche area of WordPress development.
All that considered, a portfolio is a great way to demonstrate past success. It enables buyers to see the potential in your agency by assessing your abilities, client satisfaction, ongoing projects, and more. These are all factors that have the power to drive up the sale price.
Six tips to curate an attractive WordPress agency portfolio
Now, let’s take a look at six tips to curate a powerful portfolio for your WordPress agency.
1. Showcase your best projects
If you’ve been offering WordPress services for many years, you’re going to have tons of projects stacked up.
You don’t need to include every relevant piece of work you’ve ever done. It isn’t ideal if buyers have to scour through hundreds of examples until they find your most prized projects.
Instead, you can showcase your best pieces. When selecting these projects, think about what skills or services they show off.
For example, you’ll want to include an example of an SEO audit, a site rebrand, an ecommerce project, and other web design services that you specialize in.
If you offer custom WordPress solutions, no two projects are the same since this involves building websites from scratch. Therefore, it might be worth implementing more samples of this kind.
Another way to identify your best case studies is to think about the result. Did the changes result in increased conversions or sales for your client? Did your solutions help them drive more traffic to the website?
2. Highlight diverse industries
Unless buyers are interested in targeting a very narrow market, it’s best to demonstrate your ability to cater to a variety of clients. The easiest way to do this is to include a diverse range of industries within your WordPress agency’s portfolio.
Here are some examples of the industries you might present:
- B2B
- Charity
- Dental
- Hospitality
- SaaS
- Small business
- Education
- Fashion
- Real estate
- Tech
- Law firm
- Healthcare
Different industries might have different challenges or goals. Therefore, this provides evidence of your flexibility and capability to tailor your offer to serve a variety of needs.
It can also help buyers see the potential when it comes to acquiring new clients, which tends to be a difficult task. This can make your agency more appealing since prospects may foresee lower client acquisition costs (CAC) in the future.
3. Provide proof of success
Another way to make your agency’s portfolio attractive to buyers is to provide indisputable evidence of your accomplishments.
Naturally, you’ll include information such as project summaries, services, and timelines (which we’ll discuss later). While this gives the buyer a better understanding of your work, it isn’t necessarily persuasive.
What’s more convincing is presenting proof of your agency’s success. Therefore, it’s a good idea to highlight a clear before/after result that clients have enjoyed.
Data is usually a good way to provide evidence because it’s completely objective. Did the project result in a higher ROI for the client? Did you substantially improve the conversion rate?
Let’s say you designed a custom WordPress website with interactive elements and animations. In this instance, you could provide proof that using high-resolution photographs or videos has boosted engagement and conversions for your client.
4. Include client testimonials
As we have seen, having a portfolio is a great way to share previous projects and help buyers better understand your abilities and services. But it doesn’t speak to your work ethic, communication skills, or professionalism.
You can add more value to your portfolio by including client testimonials. This enables buyers to assess other factors like client satisfaction, which can inform retention and churn rates.
Both of these variables are important to buyers since they impact the future profitability of your agency. But it can also give buyers a good impression of your business reputation.
When reaching out to clients, you could even supply questions to gather more specific feedback. Here are some of the things you might ask:
- What did you initially need help with?
- Did the agency meet your expectations?
- How would you describe your dealings with team members?
- What would you say was the highlight of the service?
- Would you hire the agency again (or recommend it to others)?
Although it can be daunting to ask for testimonials, clients will usually be happy to help if you’ve provided a good service. You can add their comments to your portfolio pages.
5. Be specific
Your WordPress agency’s portfolio is the ideal place to give buyers a glimpse into your methods, processes, and operations.
This can help buyers evaluate productivity levels. But it also allows them to assess the strategies behind your work, which is useful when planning for the future.
Essentially, the more detail you can provide about how, why, and what was carried out, the more valuable your portfolio is for buyers. We recommend including key details such as the timeline in which the work was completed.
If you offer a wide range of services, you could also assign projects to specific categories like WordPress migration or ecommerce. Buyers may also be interested in the team members who contributed to the project.
6. Curate tailored portfolios
This strategy may not be suitable for every WordPress agency. But one way to appeal to specific buyers is to create multiple portfolios, each with a streamlined focus.
You could curate one portfolio to entice buyers looking to acquire general-purpose agencies. Then, you might compile more specialist samples of work to target buyers who want to tap into niche areas of WordPress like ecommerce development or Divi theme design.
Many buyers also like the look of long-term contracts that offer greater financial stability. Therefore, you could curate a dedicated portfolio that contains examples of ongoing work like WordPress maintenance tasks.
This makes it easier to select your “best projects”, since you’ll be able to choose cases that are highly relevant to the buyer you’re looking to target. And with a more tailored approach, you can more easily convince buyers of your value.
Where to find buyers for your WordPress agency
So far, we’ve discussed how to curate a portfolio to persuade buyers of your agency’s value. But one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a seller is failing to select the right type of buyer for your business.
You have tons of platforms at your disposal when it comes to listing your company for sale. But if you want to ensure a smooth handover, you might consider selling to an established agency like Freshy:
Freshy is a full-service WordPress agency with a skilled team of over 40 employees. We carry out all kinds of WordPress services including website design, development, maintenance, search engine optimization (SEO), and more.
We’re also well-versed in mergers and acquisitions. In fact, we have a dedicated support team to deliver tailored care and support to all of your clients.
With fast response times, you don’t have to put up with unnecessary holdups which can make the process long and tiresome. You also don’t have to be the biggest agency or even the most profitable company, since Freshy values potential above anything else.
We encourage you to conduct your own due diligence to see whether we’re a good fit for your agency. Feel free to explore our portfolio to get a good idea of our capabilities. Then, when you’re ready, all you have to do is complete this short form to start discussions.
Conclusion
If you have time to prepare for the sale of your agency, it’s a good idea to maximize its value. A well-curated portfolio provides evidence of your abilities. It also gives buyers insight into your productivity levels, client satisfaction rates, and more.
Here are six tips to creating an attractive portfolio for buyers:
- Showcase your best projects.
- Highlight diverse industries.
- Provide proof of success.
- Include client testimonials.
- Be specific about details.
- Curate tailored portfolios.
At Freshy, we’re interested in acquiring all kinds of WordPress agencies, regardless of size, revenue, or niche. With an in-house support team on hand, your clients will be taken care of throughout every step of the process. Complete this quick form to kickstart the conversation today!
Featured image credit: Pexels.