In 2006, Dotty Scott built a website for her husband’s small business. Frustrated by the lack of quality support available at the time, she learned as much as she could about HTML and CSS – the primary coding languages required for web design – and soon found herself opening a business of her own. Since then, Premium Websites LLC has built more than 300 websites for clients in the Vancouver area.
Scott’s company, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this past fall, has grown beyond just website design services. Today, she also offers content creation services, social media for business training and video marketing.
According to Scott, her clients are primarily small business owners who come to her because she understands their needs as a small business owner; she knows that her clients may not be experts in web design, but they want to understand the websites she’s building for them.
“People tell me they really appreciate that when they have a question, I can answer that question in terms they can understand and I don’t make them feel stupid for asking whatever the question is,” said Scott, whose company earned Best in Business recognition in 2013 for web consulting.
Potential Premium Websites customers also get a taste of Scott’s helpful explainers when they check out her website or subscribe to her newsletter. She regularly produces short videos that help viewers understand and successfully implement web-based concepts that will help them grow their businesses.
“It’s [a] really short how to do one thing, so it could be something with Facebook or any of the social networks, but the secret is that I only put one concept in the video and it’s something that is easy to explain and the videos are 45 seconds or so.”
That small piece of help has translated into big business said Scott, since she is able to use the videos to demonstrate her personalized service, easy explanations and knowledge of her field.
Offering clients clear explanations is not the only thing Scott delivers on. She also makes sure that customers know they can reach her easily – a rare quality, she said, in the tech world.
That may be one reason why Premium Websites has nothing but 5-star ratings on Google.
“I’m known in the community and this may sound really strange, but I actually answer my phone and when I’m really busy I actually return a message,” said Scott. “There’re a lot of people in my specific industry that don’t have really good people skills. They’re more analytical and they’re engineer-type people.”
Differentiating herself from other web designers has been critical to Scott’s ability to survive, even when the economy collapsed in 2008. Fortunately, Scott explained that even when the country experiences economic struggles, her services are still needed.
“I see that my market, small businesses, we are always going to have a foot in the door with the economy,” she said. “There’re always people coming up with great ideas that they want to bring to market. There are always going to be people that want to be self-employed instead of being an employee, and they’re going to find a way to do it.”
In fact, Scott encourages people who are considering opening their own business to figure out what they are good at and take the plunge, adding that it’s “just a matter of figuring out how to run your business and there’s a lot of help with that out there.”
