Stick with me for a second.
Imagine you own a burger stand. A competitor opens up across the street. What do you do? Do you lower your prices? Add tacos to the menu? Do you rebrand as a fancy gourmet restaurant?
These are the exact same questions WordPress freelancers and agencies face every single day. We just use different words. “Should I lower my prices to compete with Upwork?” “Should I add SEO services?” “Should I rebrand as a high-end digital agency?”
I went down a rabbit hole watching a video from The Wall Street Journal called “The Business Strategies Behind McDonald’s, Aldi, 7-Eleven and More.” It’s a masterclass in business strategy, and I was shocked at how relevant it was to our world.
The big lesson is this: successful businesses are not random. They are the result of deliberate, often ruthless, strategic choices. Liquid Death chose to be a punk rock water company. Aldi chose to be the cheapest. McDonald's chose to be everywhere.
They didn't try to be everything to everyone. They chose a lane. It's time we did the same.
Put in to Practice: Choosing Your Lane
For the Freelancer Competing with the World
The Strategy: Radical Differentiation (The Liquid Death Play)
- The Problem: Your website looks and sounds like every other freelancer's. “I build beautiful, responsive WordPress websites…” Yawn.
- The Move: Be the “un-designer.” Be the one who builds brutally minimalist, lightning-fast sites and writes copy that says, “If you want parallax scrolling and animations, I am not your guy.” Instantly, you've repelled the clients you hate and become a magnet for the ones who share your philosophy. That’s a brand.
The Strategy: Niche Domination (The Athletic Brewing Play)
- The Problem: You're a generalist, which means you're always learning a new industry and can't build up specialized expertise.
- The Move: Go all-in on one industry you find interesting. For the next year, you are the “WordPress expert for independent podcasters.” You learn their specific needs (podcast hosting integration, episode templates, show notes SEO). You're no longer just a web developer; you're an indispensable part of their business ecosystem.
For the Agency Trying to Scale Profitably
The Strategy: Operational Efficiency as a Weapon (The Aldi Play)
- The Problem: Every project is a unique, handcrafted masterpiece that drains your team's energy and kills your profit margins.
- The Move: Stop building from scratch. Seriously. Develop a proprietary “Agency Starter Theme/Plugin” that has all your best practices built-in: your preferred security setup, your core ACF fields, your base performance tweaks. This isn't cutting corners; it's what pros do. You're creating a repeatable system that guarantees quality and frees up your team to focus on high-value custom work, not installing the same five plugins for the hundredth time.
The Strategy: Localization (The McDonald's Play)
- The Problem: You offer the same generic “Web Design Package” to every client.
- The Move: Adapt your core offering to the “local taste” of your client's industry. If you work with lawyers, your package shouldn't just be “5 Pages and a Contact Form.” It should be a “Client-Winning Law Firm Website” that includes a “Case Results” post type, an “Attorney Profiles” section, and integration with their legal scheduling software. It's the same work, but packaged as a high-value, specialized solution.
Your business is a burger stand. What kind is it? Are you the cheapest, the fastest, or the best? You can't be all three. Choosing is the work.
The conversation continues in our private WP-Admin Club Facebook group. Find the link to this post's discussion thread below and tell us one strategy from the video you could apply to your business.
