TCC Podcast #149: The Unbranding Process with Lindsay Hotmire

Copywriter Lindsay Hotmire is our guest for the 149th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. We’ve gotten to know Lindsay over the past six months as she’s made some big changes to her business—including dialing in her niche and reaching out to a new kind of client. She told us all about the process she has followed as she’s made these changes (funny enough it’s the same process she walks her clients through). We asked Lindsay a bunch of stuff including: •  how Lindsay went from high school English teacher to anti-hog activist to copywriter •  how she found her first few clients so she could quit her full-time gig •  the resources she used to gain traction and reach six figures •  the “unbranding” transition she’s been going through over the last few months •  why she applied her three-part client framework to her own business •  her interest in phenomenology and how that affects her work •  how developing a framework has changed the way so works with clients •  the 5 steps of her framework and the questions she asks •  why pivots are good for your business and why you should trust the journey •  what she’s done to show up more for her audience—and where she does it •  what to do if you don’t have anything interesting to share •  the changes she’s making as she moves her business forward •  how she gets so much done as a busy mom of four teens •  what she would do differently if she had to start over Lindsay offers a calm, collected look at what it means to be a six-figure copywriter—including the struggles and successes. To hear this episode, click the play button below or subscribe and download it to your favorite podcast app. Rather read? Scroll down for a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Start with Why by Simon Sinek Researching The Lived Experience by Max Van Manan To Kill a Mockingbird Lindsay’s website Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob:   What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes, and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That's what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast Kira:   You're invited to join the club for episode 149 as we chat with copywriter, Lindsay Hotmire about her framework that helps clients understand how she helps them brand their businesses, her interest in phenomenology, and how that impacts her business, changing niches and focusing on the clients she loves, and the number one thing that's helped her push her business forward. Welcome, Lindsay. Lindsay:        Hey, I'm so excited to be here. Kira:   I know. We're excited too, and we're really grateful that we've been able to get to know you better through the Think Tank, and just chatting with you recently about all the changes you've made in your business and some of the frameworks you're developing. We've got to talk to you about this, and of course, hit record as we're chatting through some of this. Why don't we start with your story? How did you end up as a copywriter? Lindsay:        Yes, so my story. I always tell people I hate telling my own story. I like to collect people's stories better, but my story really starts, I guess professionally back in 1999. I graduated from college. That was a time where I guess the internet existed, but fairly. Napster was still a thing. Facebook and LinkedIn, they didn't even exist, and so I knew I loved to write, but I graduated from college with an education degree. I was going to teach high school English. I thought that that's what I wanted to do because I understood even then the power of language to kind of change lives, and I thought, ‘What better place to do that than in a classroom.’ I realized pretty quickly that that wasn't really the place for me. I just ... My husband is an educator. He spent his life teaching educators, and so I have the utmost respect for educators, but it wasn't my place. That wasn't my passion, and so by the time I had baby number two, I decided to step out of the world of education, and so over the next few years, as I was having babies, raising my family, I did lots of things part-time. I worked in a law office, I taught part-time at a university, I worked on local political campaigns, and I became an activist for sustainable agriculture. That is the thing that really changed everything for me. That's how I became a copywriter. 15,000 hogs turned me into a copywriter. The story is really, I became an activist for sustainable agriculture and realized that all the processes laid out for me to affect change, the democratic processes, they weren't working. I just thought, ‘If I'm going to affect change, the only way I can do it is through the written word,’ and so I went on, got my master's in professional writing, and started freelancing. A few years later, I became Assistant Director in Comms and Marketing at a small private university, and spent a few years in that job, and then some things changed, turnover in different staff and I just realized, ‘It's time for me to get out,’ and so I said, ‘Okay, Lindsay. When you're making as much freelancing as what you are at this full-time job, you can quit.’ That was about three months, and that was back in April of 2016, and now here I am. Rob:   I want to go back to the hogs, like what do you have against hogs, and how did that start the whole thing? Was this you saw like farming wasn't good, and so you want to make changes? I'm curious about the trigger here that made you the copywriter. Lindsay:        Right. Yeah, totally unlikely thing for me to ever get involved with, but my husband and I had bought a house. We completely vetted it, renovated it, moved in three months later, 15,000 hogs became our neighbor, so now they'd surrounded us within three-square miles, and the way that ... We lived in Ohio at the time. The way Ohio law is written is they were all unregulated, so there was no watchdog, so one farmer had all of these hogs, and there's just no watchdog, and that just concerned me because I thought, ‘What's this doing to our water?’ You just had to step outside to know what it was doing to your air, and more importantly, more significantly to me was what it was doing to the fabric of the communities. You have these small rural communities that had been very historically close-knit communities. Several dozens of the families had lived there for generations, and it was tearing our community apart at the seams, and so when I got my master's in Professional Writing, my thesis was I traveled all throughout the State of Ohio and captured the stories of these neighbors of rural farms all throughout the state, and it was the same tale of people losing faith in the democratic process, their communities falling apart, friends becoming enemies, just sad tales of disillusionment, and so yeah. It just changed my life. It completely changed my life, and so I kind of look back at it and laugh, but yeah, it was really a life-changing moment for me. I still eat bacon though. Rob:   Yeah. It could have been that then, but it is interesting that things like that can have such a profound impact on like a career change. Jumping forward then, when you decided to leave your job, but you wanted to make sure that you were making enough in freelance, what did you do to get yourself out in front of clients because three months feels like a pretty short timeline to replace a full-time income? Lindsay:        Right. Well, a few things. Number one, keep in mind, I was working at a small private university, and so we're not talking a lot of income. For anybody who works in that field, you know what that's like. It's not like I was replacing a six-figure income. That's number one. Number two is that in that kind of 10-year span that I was doing lots of things in the midst of raising four babies, I freelanced, and so I left that network behind when I stepped into the full-time workforce, and so that was my first step, was to reach back out to that old network and say, ‘Hey, I'm back in the game, and so if you have anything that you need or you know anybody who does, please direct them to me.’ Really, just by a lot of grace, I feel, things just moved in my direction, and the day that I quit my job, I walked out, drove home, got home, and the phone rang, and it was a husband of a friend of mine who said, ‘Hey, I heard you quit, and we need a researcher at our marketing agency. Would you want to do this on retainer basis?’ That was almost like two-thirds of my income that I just had walked away from, that retainer was, and so that was a huge plus and bonus for me as well, was to be able to get on something like that. That's how that worked for me. Kira:   What type of projects were you taking during that time? You mentioned the retainer. Were you mostly taking on retainers? Did you develop and find a niche early on? What did that look like in those early days? Lindsay:        Yeah, absolutely not. I wasn't mostly retainers. It was that one retainer, and then the rest was just hodgepodge. I took on really anything that came to me, partly because I, maybe of my scrappy personality. I'm just going to get in there like a cross-country runner, and use your elbows to nudge in and out, and just do what you have to do to win the race, and so I was willing to take on really any type of client that came to me, and ... I don't know if I just answered your question, Kira or if I talked around that but ... Kira:   Yeah. I guess I'm just wondering also, what was the big thing or one thing that helped you grow the most in those early days in your business because we know behind the scenes that you had a lot of success early, and you became that six-figure, sought-after, a business owner,