Building a Self-Sustaining Business

Building a simple business should be, well, simple. But it’s not. So I invited business consultant Justin Wise to join me for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast to talk about all the complex ideas that go into building a simple business that supports you (and not the other way around). We covered a lot of ground from content creation to positioning to offers and more. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

Justin’s Newsletter
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Transcript:

Rob Marsh: What does it take to create and run a truly simple copywriting business? We’re going to talk about that today on The Copywriter Club Podcast.

One of the many reasons that business owners fail at running their businesses is complexity—and by the way, this includes copywriters and content writers who own and run their own businesses too. We can serve so many kinds of clients and do so many kinds of work and even serve a bunch of different niches. And with all those options, we sometimes create a business that has lots of offers, and lots of messages to appeal to lots of different prospects. There are people who make that work, but this kind of complexity burns most of us out. So I invited business consultant and founder of Simple Business, Justin Wise, to talk about what we need to do to build a truly simple business that doesn’t require 60 hours of work a week to keep running.

We cover a lot of ideas or levers in this episode… dailish emails, simple offers, customer journeys, pricing, content creation, sharing content…it all comes down to how you talk about what you do and who you do it for… differently.

Differentiation is one of those things that a lot of copywriters tend to struggle with. We do so many of the same things that seeing what makes you different is really hard, especially when we’re sitting inside our own businesses. Someone once said, you can’t read the label from inside the bottle. That’s so true when applied to your copywriting business. 

Figuring out the thing that makes you different from all of the other writers out there is critical. And if you can do it, you’ll probably not struggle to connect with your ideal clients and land bigger, higher paying projects.

Justin and I also talked about the pressure to be producing all the content, talking about all the things on all the platforms and how none of that leads to a simple business. 

I think you’ll like this discussion that Justin and I had so stick around.

Before we get to my interview with Justin, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. Unless you are hitting the 30 second skip button when you get to this point of the show, you are no doubt familiar with The Copywriter Underground. I talk about it every week. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, my interview with Justin Wise…

Justin, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. I would love to start just by hearing your story and how you became basically an advisor to literally hundreds of companies that are trying to differentiate and simplify and find an audience and make money. So how did you get here?

Justin Wise: Well, it’s the standard career path that everybody takes, unemployed house painter to pastor to business owner.

Rob Marsh: There you go, you and everyone else.

Justin Wise: It’s pretty typical, but yeah, long story short, I graduated college in 2003 and I had every intent of being in the radio and film industry, radio, TV and film, and went out to Los Angeles, moved there for a summer, and then promptly moved back immediately to Iowa, entertainment industry. That’s where I’m from, Iowa, but the entertainment industry, very quickly it became clear that this was not… this is not a long term career choice that I was interested in and not that it’s bad or wrong, but it just wasn’t for me. And so I kind of went into this identity crisis when I got back, like a lot of college kids do, where you realize, like, oh, the work that I thought I was going to do with my degree is not going to materialize. It’s not going to work. And, you know, I grown up going to church, and this isn’t really a church thing, but had kind of fallen out of that. And then my parents were like, Hey, uh,
you know, it may be a good idea to go to church again. Like you don’t have to go to our church, just go to a church.
So I did. And then, long story short, I liked what they were doing there, and they were up to some cool stuff. And so as I started going and got employed there, and that’s what I had every intent of being. Was a ordained Lutheran pastor, and then we had kids,
and that changes everything. Yeah, it did in more ways than one. But you know, you don’t go into non profit world to make tons of money.
And so the practical realities of having a kiddo and a wife who ideally loved, and obviously still love to this day, who wanted nothing more than to be a stay at home mom, we realized something had to change, because I was making, at the time, my highest salary, and this was after like four pay raises was 30 grand a year. And I don’t care where you live in America, that’s really difficult to live on one salary alone. And my wife was the breadwinner at the time, so I knew something had to change and so that’s where I started experimenting with marketing.

I didn’t know that that’s what I was doing at the church, but that’s exactly what I was doing. And so I ended up helping other churches. And then other business owners, or businesses started paying attention. They’re like, Hey, how’d you do that? I was like, well, I’ll show you. And they’re like, cool, we’ll pay you. I was like, wait, what? You’ll pay me to do this stuff. And so, long story short, that landed some consulting gigs and coaching gigs, and I quickly realized I can make way more doing this than working at the church. Launched my first business in 2014 and Bing, bang, boom. Here we are, 10 years later, doing the same stuff.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. So what were some of those early successes? What were you helping the churches and those early companies do that got you noticed.

Justin Wise: Yeah, so the the reality was like, This was probably 2004, 2005 and social media was still pretty early in its infancy. In fact, I don’t even think Twitter, at the time, was called. Twitter wasn’t around that. So being able to see clearly, like you can have these platforms and put your message on these platforms, and other people who aren’t in your immediate area can see those messages and take action when you ask. So that was really valuable and helpful, obviously, to our church and to other churches, but more importantly, it you know, businesses were were catching on to this. Again, this is in the early days of social and so being able to say to them, Hey, you can like, have a Facebook page, and you can write stuff on the Facebook page, and then more people will come into your business. So if you write the right stuff, and you make an invitation and you make an ask, or people are going to come to your restaurant or to your you know, to your to your spa or to your salon, or more people are going to hire you for coaching, consulting. And so helping people you know drill down into their message as a business, and then helping them communicate what that primary message was in at the time, what was a new medium, and that’s where the opportunity was. And frankly, it still is. It’s just It looks different, but you know those early wins, it sounds crazy, but like the early wins were literally just, hey, we’re on social we got on social media and our your competition is not and and, you know, used to be back in the day, you could just post stuff and like everybody would see it. Everybody who liked your page, or whatever, they would see it.

Now, of course, it’s not the case, but watching people and watching business owners, where it started to click, like this is a new way I can speak to folks. They can hear about our business, and it will grow our you know, our revenue, our leads, our whatever in return, it all kind of revolved around that

Rob Marsh: Makes sense. Obviously, that social media landscape has changed dramatically since those early days. So, and I know we’re going to get into this in a variety of ways, but if you had to do it over, but using today’s social media landscape, do you think you could, you could still succeed? What would have to change from what you were doing back
then?

Justin Wise: Yeah. So, like, the premise is pretty much the same. The main difference in where it kind of came late to the party was an email list, because, like these social media platforms that are rented land, we don’t own them, unless your name is Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or whoever owns LinkedIn, let’s say…

Rob Marsh: Microsoft.

Justin Wise: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You don’t own those platforms. And because you don’t know on those platforms, you don’t own your followers on that platform. And so in the early days, I spent a lot of time and energy building up those platforms and thinking that the platform was the thing, but it actually wasn’t. Because. Because when the restrictions started, when you had to start moving to pay to play, so you make a post, then you have to pay to boost it, or whatever to get more people to see it, then you figured out real quick you didn’t own that audience. And one thing you do on though, is an email list. You own those names. So once they opt into your list and they say, yes, you may send me emails. Those are names that you can carry from platform to platform. That’s an asset, a business asset, that you own. So if I were to start all over again, I would still focus on getting the eyeballs right, whether it be through social media or ads. But the very next step would be moving to an email list, because that’s something that you can control. You have, you know, it’s something that you own. You can move from platform to platform. And there’s no better way, in my opinion, to build a connection with an audience than daily ish emails.

So may I always preface by saying I don’t send daily emails. I send daily ish emails, and that’s simply because I don’t want to write an email every day.

Rob Marsh: Totally understandable.

Justin Wise: But those are people that, and some of them I’ve had relationship with since I started that list back in you know, whatever it was, 2007 2008 and that’s a long time. And those folks, they may not be immediately in the binding pocket for something, a product, service or offering that I have, but if you stay in touch with them, they’re gonna remember and when lightning strikes and they’re ready to go, they go. They can’t think of anybody else that they’d rather work with than you. So that’s about the only change that I think I would make today is focusing, first and foremost, on an email list because of that ownership issue.

Rob Marsh: I agree 100% and this is something that, you know, I’ve been saying for a long time. I found something, though, with copywriters and content writers, that is kind of interesting. There’s a hesitation among so many of them to actually start a list, I think because they only need two or three clients a month in order to make pretty good money. And so building a list of hundreds and hundreds or even, 1000s, if you’re not selling courses, you’re not selling consulting or coaching of some kind, maybe feels like overkill. What would you say to in that situation?

Justin Wise: Well, first and foremost, if you want to run a service based business, 100% meaning a client hires you to do the work or to produce the widget you in exchange for dollars and cents. There are some people on this planet that that is all they want to do, they don’t really want to grow much like you’re saying, two to three clients is going to be just fine. And clients will rotate in, clients will rotate out, but so long as they have those two to three clients, they’re going to be fine. Cool, great. If that is the type of business and model that you’re comfortable running, then yeah, huge email list, and concerted effort into growing that list may not be something that is a wise use of your time.

However, what I would say is, at the very least, even if that is your model, you benefit personally, tremendously by even doing something as simple as a weekly newsletter. And the reason being is, number one, it keeps you, keeps your finger on the pulse of whatever market you’re serving. Number two, it helps you explore your own ideas. This is what I find to be the most valuable part of writing consistently and my, you know, my, uh, my bucket or my the manifestation of that happens to be an email list, but it helps me sharpen and shape my ideas in a way that I don’t know anything else could so if nothing else, it serves you as the writer, to say this actually is helping me get sharper and smarter and brighter, and that inevitably is going to transfer into value for your clients. So that alone is a huge winner. Why? I think, you know, 99% of businesses should fold in some form of newsletter, not to mention the fact that there are going to be people on that list who get used to hearing from you, and they enjoy hearing your thoughts? I hear from people every single week, every time I send a newsletter. Here’s what I want people to see primarily is, again, if you’re if you’re content on saying, hey a couple clients, that’s all I need every month. Great.

But what I would also encourage people to consider, what I would also consider anyone listening this to this to consider is, hey, is there a way for me to add a revenue stream to my service based business in a way that takes what I know and turns it into a product? So it’s not that it has to replace your service based business. It’s not that it has to take up even. A ton of more time, but it is to say, How can I leverage and utilize these skills that I’ve acquired over the years in a way that’s not directly related to pushing buttons and pulling levers? We have tons of folks that we’ve worked with over the years who just know so much about their subject matter world class, they don’t need more skills, but, and they don’t really have a ton of time either. To say, oh, I can spend, you know, a ton of energy and calendar time spinning off this new kind of area of my business, but it is to say taking that knowledge and turning it into profit. And of course, an email list to pull this all together is one of the best ways that I know to say, for instance, hey, you know that I do this service, whether it’s copywriting, whether it’s butchering, baking, candlestick making, it doesn’t matter, but if you that may that might be your thing to hire me for the service, but I can show you how to do it, and here’s what it looks like. That’s where those knowledge based products, those info based products, even if someone hasn’t considered it before, can add that extra revenue stream based on the expertise that they’ve built up over the years implementing that service based side.

Rob Marsh: I’m glad you said that. I think that there’s probably also one more, there’s probably a lot more benefits to it. But if you’re only running the service based business, and you need those three clients every month, it’s really easy to go out to your list of only 100 or 200 people and say, Hey, I have an opening next month. Now’s the time to book and as opposed to having to go out into social media or, you know, pitching clients or whatever. And so it because not everybody is ready to buy at the time that they join your list. Ultimately, that number of people is basically out there waiting to work with you, and if you don’t have them on your list, it’s harder to reach them in some cases, maybe impossible.

Justin Wise: Oh yeah, yeah, there’s just an accessibility that you can’t replicate any other way than with your email list. So if you have a gap in your client roster, if you want to try out a new idea, if you want to get input. I mean, yeah. I mean, the obvious benefits of having a list is you can sell stuff when you want, but there’s, there’s an equal, and sometimes I even think it’s, it’s a bigger benefit of being able to just say, Hey, you’re on this list. I have this idea. What do you think about this idea and not worry about, like, dollars and cents or making an offer, but just to simply say, where are you? Because you’re in my market, where’s your head at when I say this thing, or when I put this idea out into the universe? What is your reaction to it, that in and of itself, is valuable, even if you don’t sell anything outside of your services. So it’s a good discipline, no matter who you are, what type of business you run, to get in the habit of acquiring those email addresses and conversing with the people on your list in one way, shape or form.

Rob Marsh: So when we when you were answering another question earlier about how you got started in marketing and the process that you were going through, the first thing that you said is that you helped people figure out what is the message. And this feels like something you’re still doing today with all of your clients, and it’s really the first step of everything that we do as business people. Copywriters, should know this, but we’re really bad at doing this for ourselves. Let’s talk about that process a little bit.

Justin Wise: Yeah, offers. I mean, when we talk about like one of our mentoring programs is called simple business, and there’s three areas that we focus on, simple offers, simple messaging, simple sales or simple systems, depending on what we’re looking at, and it all starts with the offer, right? The offer is where everything begins. Because if you don’t have something a that people want, and you’d be surprised how many people put offers out there in the world that people don’t actually want. So you have to have to have something that people want, but you also have to have to have something that you enjoy delivering, that you enjoy fulfilling on, that you know is fun and profitable for you to create those two things go hand in hand.

The market has to acknowledge, recognize the value in your offer, but you and as equally as important, you have to enjoy doing it, because if you don’t, it’s not sustainable. And I’m not interested in anything that’s not sustainable, so looking at your offer and getting guardrails in place, testing that messaging out, um. And talking about it with people. We call it a no brainer offer, or sometimes a godfather offer. The reasons might be obvious. You want your offer to be something that’s so good, people can’t refuse it. And so that’s a that’s a process, and it really comes down to saying, Hey, where are your pain points?

There’s three reasons, maybe sometimes four, depending on what day it is. And when you ask me why people buy from you, you make them money, you save them money, you save them time, or you provide some sort of pleasure. Those are the three, sometimes four, reasons why people will buy from you, you make them money, you save them money, you save them time, you provide some sort of pleasure, and you may know that intuitively what your offer is or which one of those boxes it checks, but your audience doesn’t, and so you have to make it really, really clear and plain to them which one of those categories that your offer fits under. And sometimes it’s not always clear. Sometimes it changes. Sometimes you may want to emphasize one over the other. That’s where messaging comes in. And ultimately, if you have an offer that people want to buy, and when I say buy, or when I say interested in what I don’t mean is somebody saying, Yeah, that sounds cool, right, right? Or like your mom saying, Oh, that sounds amazing. No, no. What I mean is people are willing to give you money for it. That’s what it means. That’s what I offer, that people are interested in and are willing to buy doesn’t mean they say they’re willing to buy it. It means they’re buying it. So when you have that and you like doing it and it’s profitable, that’s where messaging comes in, and messaging is like probably one of the most frustrating components when it’s working against you, and it’s one of the most liberating aspects of running a business when it’s working for you, and messaging is just simply how you talk about your offer to the people that you want to have by it, or the people that you want to serve. That’s all messaging is.

And I find so many businesses that have an amazing offer, but because their positioning is weak, or their positioning is is unclear, or their positioning is focused on the wrong things that they suck. Their business suffers. They’re not getting the type of clients that they want. They’re not getting the volume of clients that they want. And it’s not an offer issue, meaning it’s not what they actually produce, it’s how they talk about what they produce. And when you’re in that messaging kind of like, you know, that dark hole of messaging working against you, it is not fun at all. And so one of the first things we’ll do is clean up someone’s messaging, and again, it’s just simply talking about it’s how you talk about your offer. We use something called Marketing milestones.

To do this, marketing milestones. You know, if you think about your call it whatever you want, your ideal client, your ideal avatar. We call it your specific person, the person that pays you the most, the easiest. All right, that’s how we define what a specific person is, or what an ideal client is. It’s the person who pays you the most, the easiest, that person is on a journey in their lives. No matter how what business you have, you have someone that you want to work with. You know, if I were to ask you who’s your favorite client, somebody should come to mind immediately. That’s most likely your specific person. They weren’t always where they’re at now, right? And so we look at marketing milestones to say, what is the path of this person’s journey? It’s the same person. They just go through different levels in their life or their career, and at some point they’re going to meet you, and it’s your job to say, Hey, you’re at level let’s say six, and you want to get to level 10. I’m the guy, or I’m the gal, that gets you from level six, where you’re at now, to level 10. And describing where they’re at now and where they want to get to is a matter of positioning. It’s a matter of messaging. And I would also include pricing, is positioning. So there’s not much difference mechanically between a Toyota and a Lexus, not really. There might be a few bells and whistles, at least from a mechanical standpoint, the difference in the price tag ultimately comes down to positioning. It comes down to messaging, it comes down to pricing, and every business adheres to those same rules, whether we’re aware of it or not. So getting the offer down is important. It’s foundational. You have to do it. But more importantly, it’s figuring out. How do I talk about this in a way that’s unique and different? It’s not it’s not so much what you’re saying. It’s how you’re saying it. In my mind, that’s what positioning really boils down to when it comes to differentiation.

Rob Marsh: How do you do that with your clients? How do you help them find the one thing that makes them the one that people want to work with, or the only one that they want to buy?

Justin Wise: Yeah. So it ultimately comes down to what we believe is that everybody has what I call a difference factor. It’s not something you have to go and create. It’s not something that you have to manufacture. It’s inherent, either in you or your business, and there’s differences, right? So lots of times we work with with people who are one person shops. So what we do is we dig into their specific difference factor as a person, and we have a couple exercises that we walk them through. But ultimately, it’s evident. It’s mostly evident in the people who know, like and trust you already, right? So then we have our clients go out and ask, Hey, what? What do you they ask the people who know, like and trust them already, what do you believe I’m best in the world at? What am I world class at? And we wait for the responses to come in. And so in a lot of ways, it’s, it’s amazing to me how many times I’ve done this. Personally, I’ve done this at least once a year for the last 10 years. And you know, the people that I asked this question to they’re, they’re usually different, and I don’t ask the same people every year.

It’s amazing to me how, how, how clear and close the answers are to one another. So, for instance, I know my difference factor is ideate, create, communicate. So think of big ideas. Create, pull those ideas into reality, and then talk about the what I’m doing as I’m doing it right? So this podcast is a perfect example of that, and I know that if I can do those three things, then I will never have to worry about getting another client ever again in my entire life. But I didn’t just wake up one day with those words in my head. Those are all words and phrases that have been reflected to me throughout the years from the people that I’ve asked to help me define my difference factor.

So if someone’s listening to this, it’s really as simple as going to clients, family members, friends. I’ve had people do this. I gave a talk one time in a pool in Cabo San Lucas. So I’ve had people bring in their phones in the pool and do this exercise right from the pool, and they’re getting answers, you know, within 20 minutes. So it’s not some long, drawn out process, but having a base for that, and if you run a business. So let’s say you have a business with 50 people. We’ve had folks in the manufacturing industry, for instance, do this, and their CEO will do this, not for himself. He didn’t do it for himself. He did it on behalf of the business. It’s the same thing. The answers are a little bit different. It’s the same process, right? So we’ve had roofing companies do this, like I said, manufacturing companies. So it’s not isolated to just people who run, let’s say, a personal brand or a solopreneur. This can really work for any type of business. And those answers, like I said, this is not something you have to manufacture, it’s not something you have to create. It’s it’s in you, it’s already there. You’ve likely been doing it your whole entire life. We just give you the recognition software to go and find what those things are, so you can double, triple, quadruple, down on those items. And when people do that, believe it or not, they make more money.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it makes sense. So part of this getting people to know and like you is obviously the content that we’re putting out into the world. I mean, we’ve got to show up somewhere so that people can hear your voice or read your thoughts, or, you know, whatever the thing is that we’re sharing. So how do you think about content, not just the creation of it or the ideation part of it, but also the sharing of it, you know, like, how does that all fit together for a business that is trying to stand out?

Justin Wise: So I think, I think 90% of people, well, there’s two ditches, okay, there’s two ditches. There’s the not enough ditch, there’s the too much ditch. When it comes to content, I have to be careful to enunciate my words there when I say that, yeah, there’s, there’s the not enough ditch and the too much ditch. Sometimes I’ll find people who are just, frankly, not doing enough. They’re not creating enough content, they’re not creating any content, in some cases. And you know, the reasons are, aren’t bad or wrong. It’s usually, oh, I’m busy. I’m this, I’m that. Those things all may be true, but you need, in that case, to find time to create some sort. Of the content. But what I find way more often is actually people are creating too much content. And what I mean by that is they feel like this pressure.

Okay, I got to come up with a term for this, but they feel this pressure. Maybe FOMO is the best term for it right now. But this pressure to be on all the platforms all the time, saying all the things to all the people. And I just don’t believe now, at some point in the past that may have been a viable growth strategy. I don’t think you need to do that anymore. The mediums that we’re talking about, the social mediums, by and large, save a few of them, they’re basically all the same. They’re all kind of moving to this, you know, multi modal type content platform where you can put video, audio, text, images. Those are the four ways in which you can create content. By the way you they’re moving to this, this, these platforms can accommodate all of those forms, right? So what I tell people is, pick one platform. It doesn’t matter what you know, you may want to take your audience into consideration.

People are joining these different platforms, and chances are, because of they’re so big, the major platforms, anyway, your audience is going to be on there, right? So whether it’s Instagram or Facebook or or x or LinkedIn or YouTube or whatever, I would say, just pick one, pick one platform. Dominate. Don’t dabble. That’s what I tell our folks, dominate. Don’t dabble. And I find that so many people dabble on these different platforms, and so they feel like they have to be in all these different channels. And you know, think of it like your TV programming. One TV channel is hard enough, but let’s say you’re on five different social media platforms, then you have to say, I gotta program five different channels. That’s way more takes way more energy, way more time, and even if you’re just copying and pasting content that still requires time, that still requires energy.

So I tell people, pick one platform dominate, Don’t dabble. And then it’s all about repurposing baby like I don’t know, I don’t know that I’ve written an original email from scratch in probably close to four, maybe even five years. And I don’t mean that I’m copying and pasting old emails. What I do mean is I’m taking what I know has worked in the past, repurposing it. Because I can guarantee you, the people who were on my list even five years ago, they’re not going to remember. Oh, hey, you sent that email on, you know, September 21 2019 they’re not going to remember that. And if they do, I probably need to get them off my email list, because they’re psychotic. No one’s going to remember that stuff. Same thing with these social media platforms. So we want people repurposing their stuff. So that means you take an email and maybe you make a YouTube script out of it. You take a post from Facebook and you turn it into an email. You take an email and turn it into a thread on X so you’re not creating more content, you’re just simply distributing it and thinking through, how can I take the stuff that I know has worked or that I’ve enjoyed creating and repurpose it a million different ways, because I promise you, the memory, the attention span, is so short anymore that folks aren’t going to remember it, and if they do remember it, it’s probably going to be a good reminder more than anything else.

Limit your platforms, you know, give yourself some grace and freedom to repurpose stuff from the past. I’ve got probably close to 50-60, templates now that I go back to time and time again. So templates are super helpful and focus more on you got to create something, but then the game really is focusing on distribution more than it is creation.

Rob Marsh: And so getting those, those core pieces in place, and then focusing on distribution of those pieces, I know, and I agree with you, the game is distribution, but I think a lot of people still get hung up on the creation, the what do I write? Even if you know they’re copywriters, or you know they can do this for other people, sometimes writing about what we know is is difficult. So how do you think about that? Do you have you it bucketed out like, Hey, these are the three or five things that I always write about, and I’m choosing from one of those, and it’s just applying a different template to that particular idea this day and the next one, or how are you thinking about content that way?

Justin Wise: At its base I’ve had over the last year, kind of this complete transformation and how I think about content, and it comes down to “how to” content versus “why to” content. All right, “how to” content is, how to do this, how to do that, how to underwater basket weave, you know? How to butcher, how to bake, how to candlestick make. And I’ll tell you we are how to-ed out. “How to” content feels like we’re adding value. You know, you’re the adage with content all just add value. Well, when most people think of just add value, what they think of is, oh, then I have to do “how to” content, meaning, step by step. Do this, then do that. Basically you’re giving away the the magician’s secrets, right? And “how to” content is really difficult to produce, at least in most industries, because you got to get your facts straight. You got to get the details right.

I remember one time when I owned a Facebook ads agency, we were hell bent on doing “how to” content. This is before I had my revelation. And some of this, let’s just say, 500 word blog posts we would write would take literal days to produce, because we had to make sure, if we were going to give people this step by step, that it was accurate, because you run into a whole set of problems if it’s not accurate. So my position shift when I discovered “why to” content. So “why to” content focuses on the big picture. It’s for lack of a better term, thought leadership. It’s getting people to ask the why questions. Why should I do this? Why should I do that? If you’ve noticed, even in this conversation, we haven’t really talked much about “how to”, it’s it’s more about “why to” and those those big picture questions, that is what’s resonating with people right now. They need other people to say, forget the how to. There’s a million different how to angles you could take here. What we need to figure out is, why are you doing this, and is this the next best step for you? Why should I do this? Why should I do that so?

But by way of example, I have a client. He is a YouTube guy. He’s a guitar teacher, and he puts out YouTube videos. And when, when he came into the program, he was doing “how to” content, which took a ton of time, so how to play this tab, he’s having to pull all these tabs together and, you know, string out the chords and show people how to do this. Then the other it was very, very um, involved process. And then he switched to “why to” content when he got to this part of the program, and he said, Dude, I don’t know how this is working, but it’s working. My subs are up 50% my subscriptions are up 50% it takes me a third of the time to produce “why to” content as it does “how to” content. And I’m having way more fun making this content. And that’s because he put himself out there, not as just some run of the mill guitar teacher on YouTube, because there’s a million of those. He put himself out there as an expert, and he is an expert like that wasn’t the issue, but he was positioning himself as that expert, and it completely changed the trajectory of his content creation and thereby extension his business.

So I think a lot of people get frustrated with the content creation process, and rightly so, because when they think of content, they think, Oh, this has got to be how to, it’s got to be step by step. And not to mention, you’re essentially giving away the goods. You’re training people to not need you. It’s the old adage of, why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free? We’ve had people in our programs who have started to do this, like with their proposals. So whereas before they would do a proposal for somebody, they would outline what they’re going to do for them, and then they give that person the proposal, and then they do what they’d wait and so what I’m what I’m starting to do with some of these folks is saying, no, that’s valuable information. That’s valuable content, if you will, in the proposal, you’re essentially showing them exactly how to do what it is that you want them to pay them for you to do. You’re showing them how to do that in the proposal.

Instead of making this proposal a “how to” document, what if we made it a “why to” document, and people paid you for the pleasure of going through that process. And I’ve had people now we’ve had probably four or five people do this, and they went from giving away their proposals for free and having a 20% close rate to monetizing that process and going from a 20% close rate to a 70, 80% close rate, and getting paid to do it all along the way. So I know that was a lot, but it really what it comes down to is “how to” content versus “why to” content. Small details, big picture, vastly different ways to create content and put that put it out into the world.

Rob Marsh: I would love to talk about a very specific example of this, just so that it’s absolutely clear. Because I think at one level, it’s pretty easy to see the difference, you know, if you’re blogging, for instance, blogging an article about how to write a blog versus why to write a blog. That’s pretty clear. But when we start talking about, you know, things like coaching, you know, or helping, but copywriters, you know, would be helping their clients to accomplish this wide range. So maybe, if you’ve got an example from somebody that you’ve worked with, something from your business, where we can take a shift from that, how to to the why to can we? Can we maybe talk through an example like that?

Justin Wise: Yeah. So what this ultimately comes down to is, is predicting the future. I learned this from my dear friend Chris Lema. He calls it prediction stories. And in fact, I was just walking through an example with this with one of our clients. And he runs essentially a technology firm, all right. And he comes in, and he and his team basically do an assessment on their systems, their automations, and then they they create a solution to basically unify all those systems into one, you know, kitten caboodle. And he was running into some snags with with content. And so I was like, You’re too buried in the details of like, oh, this nerdy platform that I’ve never heard of is better because it’s has more features than this other nerdy platform that I’ve never heard of. Nobody cares about that stuff.

The Level Nine, level 10 clients that you want to attract, they’re not going to spend time or energy reading that stuff. They don’t care. What they do care about is lost revenue. What they do care about is their team underperforming because they have to do all these manual tasks that their systems should be doing but aren’t because they haven’t been audited since the Cold War. So we’re going to speak to those things, and we’re going to tell the future. So we’re going to say to your level nine client, hey, if you don’t address the automation issue in your business, meaning the inefficient tasks, these these bloated systems that have gotten, you know, so so they’ve creeped into every nook and cranny of your organization, and it’s like just this one big blob of mess, if you don’t address those things.

Let me predict your future of what’s going to happen. You’re going to lose teammates. You’re going to lose good team members because they’re frustrated of the inefficiencies, you’re going to lose clients because your systems aren’t up to date, and you can’t, you know, properly, identify, like, where are our best clients coming from? Who’s spending the most with us, who’s not? Where are their gaps, and so on and so forth, and to read the difference. So we did this real time. I wish I had the example, but I don’t in front of me. We redid it, and what he came in with was entirely different than what he left with. But I know for a fact that what he left with, it was a why two piece. So why you need to address your automations, why you need to address the inefficiencies in your you know your inventory systems, and when, when you speak to a problem at that level, it it speaks to the decision makers in the organization, whoever they may be, because those are the challenges that They’re thinking through, not the how to challenges at level one. So anybody can do this, right? You think of your ideal client, and let’s just take copywriting for instance.

Copywriting is great because you you can leverage someone’s skill to produce, you know, pieces of content that presumably either make the company or make the client more money, or take care of a task that no one on a person’s team is handled to do whatever it doesn’t much matter, but speaking to the why to or the prediction stories or thinking through saying, Okay, if you don’t hire a copywriter, here’s what’s going to happen, or here’s what’s not going to happen. You won’t have regular contact with your email list.

For instance, you won’t have a landing page that is optimized for conversions. So even the traffic that you do get, it’s not going to convert nearly as high as it could, because it’s written like, you know, a fifth grader wrote it, and so on and so forth, or it’s bloated, or whatever. And so when you start thinking through it from that angle, it really does take it really does change the way that you approach content. The how to is for when they’ve already paid you. Yeah, right. Okay, they don’t get the How to until they’ve paid you. And the how to could simply be, you take that off their plate and do it for them. Or the How to could be, you show them how to do it themselves. It doesn’t much matter, but they don’t get the How to up front. But the why two does a really good job of teasing out the problem and showing what happens if they don’t address it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, as I think about this, it feels to me like going from how to to why. Two moves you from physical or technical problems to psychological problems, and psychological problems are really what drive our behavior. So going back to the guitar guy, you know, I as I’m if I’m trying to learn guitar, of course I want to learn how to play the tab, but the why, you know, if I’m trying to, you know, impress my friends at the party is a much bigger driver for learning. And it’s, yeah, I get how it works. And I think, I mean, I’ve kind of had a mindset shift of my own as you’ve been talking through this, in the content that I need to be creating.

Justin Wise: It is. It’s an ass kicker, that’s for sure. It definitely makes you evaluate, re evaluate, like, Oh, wow. Like I said, I’ve only been recently kind of exploring this idea myself and my content, but I know, like the proof is in the pudding, right? So I am now on 100 and the the 100 and 21st week of my newsletter. So two years, basically over two years, because I do one weekly and the difference. So at the end of every newsletter, I have a survey that just says, basically, what did you think about this newsletter? And I usually get a couple responses every week. But to look at, because you can see it in the data. You can see the ratings. As I’ve focused more on y2 the ratings have gone up and up and up and up and up the responses, I get more responses from people who answer that survey at the end of the newsletter, and the responses are higher. They’re higher rated. So it’s an increase in volume and an increase in rating. And the only change, the only change that I have made in those 120 editions is shifting from how to to why to that’s it.

Rob Marsh: So we were talking about earlier on… when we were talking about emails and why we need to write them. You mentioned that one of the reasons for writing a regular email is that it crystallizes your thinking. I’m really curious about your writing process, your thinking process, how you sit down, when you when you say, Okay, it’s time to ideate. What does that look like for you?

Justin Wise: Do you want my answer today, or do I answer from, let’s say a year ago

Rob Marsh: How about both? How has it changed over time?

Justin Wise: So so the general process has remained the exact same, and the general process is, I use what Anne Lamott calls shitty first draft, right? And that I read that book in college, and it has stuck with me ever since. Bird by Bird is a book, if you want to check it out.

Rob Marsh: It’s a great book. It is a really good every writer should read it at some point. It’s phenomenal.

Justin Wise: It’s so good. There’s, there’s two concepts I took away from that and still use to this day. One is shady for strap. The other is fill an inch. So she has a picture frame on her desk. It’s an inch by an inch. It’s a square, and it’s there to visualize. Like, okay, you can write enough words to fill this square. Like, if you’re stuck, if you are wondering where to start or how to start, just start and fill the square. So I use that, and I use shitty first shot. I get it down and just crank something out. Usually shoot for anywhere between 150 and 200 ish words somewhere in between there, and get it done.

Now, what has changed is I used to then, then I go through and edit. All right, so read it out loud as I’m reading. Read it out loud again. And then when I got to a spot where I was comfortable and confident, you put in the link, she sent me email. So the starting point’s the same. Get the shoe you first drafted and but now what I use I have, I have fallen in love with chat GPT, not in a weird way, but in a way that has, as has only improved my writing. So I have that first draft in there. Now what I’ve done is I’ve trained my chat GPT on six Well, it’d be about six years, six years worth of emails that I’ve written in the past. So I took all those emails that I wrote, I loaded them up into chat GPT, and I said, build a writer’s profile off of the composite of the. Emails so chat, GPT goes through, analyzes the structure, the format, the tone, the style, all that good stuff, and spits out a writer’s profile. I’ve named that writer’s profile affectionately Justin bot.

So he’s a great employee. He never asked for a raise. He never complains, and he works all the time. He’s a really great guy. Anyway, he is trained as close as AI can be trained to talk like me, to write like me. That’s not because I’m just like pulling it out of thin air. It’s literally trained off of all the emails that I wrote for many, many years. So then I will take that, that initial draft, and run it through Justin bot. Justin bot, then cleans up the language a little bit, makes a little punchier, uh, formats it in the way that I like. All these things. Of course, you can tell it to do ahead of time. And then I get my final draft, so that is cut out now I still, most times anyway, I still read it out loud, but it has greatly reduced the amount of editing that I’ve had to do. And so it used to take me about 30 minutes to write a daily email. Now I’ve gotten that down to 10 to 15 minutes, and I think the quality has actually vastly improved, and don’t really see a downside to it, frankly.

So that’s why I asked the question, do you want it a year ago, or do you want it today? But for the most part, it’s the same. I just use AI instead of my own brain.

Rob Marsh: With the couple minutes we have left, I want to ask maybe a question. It’s way too big for a few minutes, but one of the things that you talk about is creating a business that runs itself. And obviously, a lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about here is part of that, you know, having content that’s attracting people to your newsletter, having readers that you can sell to automatically. What else? What are the other pieces of this business that runs itself? Obviously, that’s that. We’re not talking about somebody who’s necessarily writing copy for a client on a daily basis. But as people start to move into, you know, how do I use my knowledge? How do I sell? You know, the scraps for my business, the templates, the processes, those kinds of things. What are the other pieces?

Justin Wise: The one starting point for this that comes to mind is a story that I read. The name escapes me. Now I can’t remember the book. So this was not a concept that I originated with or that originated with me, rather. But when you when you ask that question, this is the first thing that popped in my head, and I’m learning to just go with that. And it’s the concept of the face, like there was this painter back in the day who was just pumping out content or pumping out paintings rather. So let’s just say if the normal painter in the 1800s or whatever it was, 1700s would produce two works a year. This guy was pumping out like 200 works a year.

Rob Marsh: The James Patterson author, James Patterson approach to art sounds like.

Justin Wise: Yeah. So it’s like, Michael Crichton, I think. Didn’t he die?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, he passed away a couple few years ago.

Justin Wise: But he is still writing books. Well, how is that? How does that happen? It Right. It comes back to this, right? So this painter figured out the reason why people pay me, the reason why patrons come and, you know, commission a painting. What is that thing? And he found out that it was the portrait. So if he did, if he did like a full body painting of somebody. He found that the highest value that he brought to the painting was the portrait or the face. And so what he did was he hired a bunch of painting underlings. I don’t know who would take the portrait, and they would do the whole entire portrait, besides the face. And so once these underlings finished the rest of the painting, this guy would step in, he would do the portrait, and that’s how he’s able to get so many paintings out the door. And when you ask that question, the very first step is to find out, what is your face? What is the portrait? What is the one thing that you do that adds 80% of the value to your business when you spend time thinking about that and defining that and refining that and testing that out, see the reason why most people don’t get to a business that can run itself is because they don’t answer that question. Because when you know the answer to that question, then you know everything else doesn’t matter. I either delete it, or I delegate it, or I just simply stop doing it.

But you can’t do that properly until you know what is the face, what’s the one and only thing that I can do that nobody else in this business currently can do. And once you know that, then you can start to work the other stuff out, right? Then you can say, okay, cool. Well, this thing that I’ve been doing and spending a ton of time and energy in like I’ll give you, for instance, we had a free community for about a year and a half. We ran a free community. And for anybody who’s running a free community, ours was on school. Doesn’t have to be on school. It could be on Facebook groups, whatever. Anybody who’s done that knows how much time and energy it took. And we had a good group of people in there. They were engaged, they responded. What I found was none of them were really converting into clients. And so then we had to have the real tough discussion of saying, Okay, this makes us feel good. Like it makes me feel good when I post something and people respond to it, and they say, Oh, this is really great, but is this contributing to the the goals of this organization? And the hard, cold answer was, No, it’s not. So we killed it. We killed that free community, and people were upset, and we, you know, told us, you know, they wanted a refund. Keep in mind, it was a free group, and so, so that was one thing that had to go bye, bye. And it’s a series of those types of decisions and businesses that, frankly, most people just won’t ever do. And so because they won’t do that, they never get to focus on the thing that they do and that they do better than anybody else in the organization, or preferably the world. So if you want a business that runs itself, you have to identify what that thing is number one, so you don’t cut it out, meaning you don’t chuck it, you hold on to it, and then you can delegate everything else or delete it if it doesn’t need to be done.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s yet another thing for me to think about. So Justin, I appreciate everything you’ve shared today, and like I said, I’ve got some things to fix about why content maybe get a little clearer on my 80% as well. I’m guessing that a lot of people listening though are also having those same kinds of thoughts to them. And so if they want more Justin in their life, or more of your advice, where are the best places to interface with you and to connect with you?

Justin Wise: Easiest place for anybody listening to this, to connect with me is go to getdifferent.co join our newsletter, get different.co and you can read, “why to” content for me every single week?

Rob Marsh: I’ve been on the list for a long time, and appreciate all of the just the ideas and approaches that you’ve shared over time and again. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you onto the podcast, and just thrilled that you had the time to share so much. So thank you. Thanks for you know your your wisdom and advice. I just really appreciate you having you here.

Justin Wise: Hey, man, thanks for the invite.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Justin for sharing his thoughts about creating a simple business. I’ve linked to Justin’s newsletter in the show notes. That’s probably the best place to jump into his world and learn from his thinking. You might also stumble across some of his posts on LinkedIn or on Twitter.

One of the ideas that Justin mentioned, that I want to emphasize, before you delete this episode from your podcast player, is the concept of dominate. Don’t dabble. Limit your platform, shrink your to do list and repurpose your thinking so that you can really focus on distribution. Distribution in one place. Sharing your one idea over and over is far more powerful than sharing 10 great ideas in a dozen places. This comes down to positioning yourself as an expert, and the more concentrated you are on one or two things, the more that that’s going to resonate with your ideal audience. What Justin shared about “how to” content versus “why to” content is critical to this. Why to content motivates, instead of teaches. It gets people on board with your message and gets them excited about working with you. It might be worth going back and listening to what Justin said about why to content and the impact that that can have on your business, especially the reduction in effort that it requires from you, the business owner, that’s probably enough for today.

Be sure to get on Justin’s list and learn more.