No more custom work. What is my way out (via templates)?

You can sell your temlates at ThemeForest and Mojo-Themes

 

Burnout huh ? Well it happens to everyone . IMHO you're way to good to go the "Dear Friends [insert Engrish]" way and ignore creativity . What burns you out are the clients . Automate that part or hire someone to do it for you . You can make a template generator with medium skills and about a week but that will only trigger more idiotic requests . Just my 0.02$

 

In your TOS charge for extra time. That way you have a way out if group 1 shows up. Create what they want, convince them it is what they want, consider it "final" and if they come crawling back, well sorry....it will now cost you X to change a font color on your site.

Ok not the best idea in the world but figured I would at least comment . It seems that you are good at what you do, so I say get some energy drinks, or coffee, or cocaine or whatever keeps you going and take a month to create what you need yourself. The old drag and drop template. I am sure you have it pictured in your head and probably have enough copy-pasta functions kicking around to expedite the process. Just pretend you are building for client example 1, except it is you.

If you find your clients getting stuck somewhere, or asking you "how" to do something with your software at least you can adjust the software for the stupid instead of chasing another company, or ending up logging into their accounts to make the changes.

Depending on your cash-flow and if your business is not under the table you hire someone to do the bitch work. You get the clients, get the money, get them to do the work and deal with the example number 1's. Yes, you might lost out on 30% of the profits, but hey, at least you lose 100% of the aggravation. Unless of course the one you hire becomes the aggravation.

Just a few ideas kind sir

 

Then just make mister hipster cry blood for your time ? I get the hipsters all the time and they also drive me insane but they magically start backing off when they see the "reasonable timeframe" cause in the contract . That basically says they're entitled to a certain number of adjustments depending on the value of the contract , if they pass that limit they're charged extra , also they're not entitled to "unlimited counseling" , time costs money and yours is no different .

 

So build a site that combines business ideals of Template Monster and Wix.

 

There are hundreds of hundreds of such website building services. It's a highly competitive niche.
For example: Wix, Webs, Weebly, Site2You, Bluevoda, Sitecube, Volusion (ecommerce website builder), ect......

They all allow you to create free websites, provides premium accounts providing a bunch of extra features and options like custom domain name, seo features, ability to display unlimited number of items in your ecommerce website and much more.

Why don't use templates from TemplateMonster http://www.templatemonster.com and create websites on their basis for your customers instead? Of course, the design won't be that custom, as you create it specifically for a client, but that can greatly save your time and nerves