TCC Podcast #382: Building and Scaling a “Real” Business with Joel Klettke

A lot of copywriters talk about building a "real" business, that is a business that isn't solely built on writing copy for clients. In the 382nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob talk with copywriter Joel Klettke who used his writing and sales expertise, developed as a copywriter, to build a team and service business bigger than what he might have built on his own. And he shared what he's learned from the experience. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Over the past 7 years of publishing this podcast, it’s pretty rare that we bring guests back for a second visit. And the guests that have been back three times? I could be wrong but by my count, that’s only happened twice. Today’s episode makes it three.  Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, my co-founder, Kira Hug, and I interviewed copywriter and founder of Case Study Buddy, Joel Klettke to catch up on what he’s been doing for the past couple of years. Joel has gone from being a top performing, in-demand copywriter to the founder of a million dollar business. And in our discussion, he shared some of the lessons he learned along the way. But first, this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. It is truly the membership for copywriters and content writers… where you can find the training, coaching, copy reviews, and community you need to build a successful copywriting business. To learn more visit thecopywriterclub.com/tcu And now let’s jump into our interview with Joel... Kira Hug: All right, so Joel, I'm not going to ask you how you ended up as a copywriter because we already covered that in episode, Rob, which episode? I know you know. Rob Marsh: Episode 21 is the first time and maybe like 107, I think, is the second time. It's been a while though. It's been a while since we chatted on the podcast. Joel Klettke: Yeah. I like these, it's almost like a snapshot in time, like journal entry to go back and listen to myself on somebody's life. Rob Marsh: How much better life was back in episode 107? Kira Hug: Well, going back to 21, I think that was the one I was listening to and reading the transcript from. That's when you were, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's when you were just starting case study, buddy, right? That was the origin of it when you were getting into case studies. Or was that 107? Rob Marsh: I think it was even before that. Kira Hug: Yeah, it was before that. We were introducing it. You had that business running at that time. Joel Klettke: Yeah, like technically Case Study Buddy is almost eight years old. It was off the side of our desks initially. And then right before the pandemic, we kind of pivoted to focus full-time on that. So that became kind of a big transition point. And then it's continued to be the full-time focus since then. So we've only really been two years, maybe three now, full-time pushing this thing. Kira Hug: Okay, well, let's go back then to before pandemic when you went all in and just curious, like what, what triggered that decision for you and your business partner to go all in on this business? Joel Klettke: I think there are a whole bunch of different factors. I think, you know, at the time, the grass is always greener in life in general, you know, like you always want to be doing that new thing. The headspace I was in at that moment was I had done the freelance thing and I'd done it well, graduated to basically being in a position of consulting for some pretty great brands, some really great projects. You get to the point that you are now making what your heroes made.  I remember listening to Joanna Wiebe talk about charging $10,000 for a landing page and thinking, that's so outlandish. And then I got there. And at that point, I was kind of hitting the ceiling. I felt like I was hitting the ceiling of my potential. I just wanted to keep growing. I wanted to change. I was finding when I was working on projects, I was going through this weird anxiety almost of like, now that I'm on this level, I have to keep delivering at this level. I have to keep being this person in this way. I still had a lot of work.  It wasn't like I was forced into a pivot, but it was kind of like, in the meantime, we have this other thing going on off the side of our desks that is growing under its own steam. It's kind of gone from you know, $17,000 in its first year, very, very part time to, you know, then maybe like 38. And then you had this big jump up to 80. And then all of a sudden, you're 200. And then you're 800. And now you're approaching a million. And meanwhile, you haven't really spent full time energy or effort. So you start to wonder, you know, what could this thing be if we really devoted when I say we I'm talking about myself.  And for those who don't know, there's a partner in the business named Jen who I used to work with agency side. And then we teamed up on this thing. So it was growing a lot. And it kind of looked like, hey, this is an opportunity to maybe build something that might outlast me. It's a chance to grow in new and different ways to build a team, to build a process, to move out of the craft per se and into the business side of business. And so it was that combination of lots of potential growth alongside this desire to keep learning and keep growing myself that just made it seem like, yeah, now we got a strike while the iron is hot. And so we did. Rob Marsh: So we're not going to talk about every piece of your journey, Joel. But just looking back, I'm curious, over the past couple of years, what would you do differently to build? If you're going to build the same business that you've built right now, Are there things that you would do differently that you didn't do the first time that might impact where you are today? Joel Klettke: Yeah, I think I had, in some senses, before I get into the most present, what I do differently. In some senses, I had a test balloon. Because when I was doing business casual full-time, I tried to build a team. And it went miserably. I focused so much on the profit side of it and the potential for that that I overlooked the people side of it and the process side of it, especially, and focusing on making it scalable from the beginning. which, you know, I didn't make the exact same mistakes with Case Study Buddy, but there's certainly things that, you know, I, in retrospect or in hindsight, it's, it's easy to see where you might've deviated.  So one of those things is like, I was petrified of the whole idea of hiring and like full-time, like, how do you know when you can bring someone in and like, isn't there a lot of paperwork and like the government and all, you know, like that whole notion, even though it wasn't that complicated in retrospect, it kept me back from you know, making some of those decisions. And so for a long time, you know, we held off on bringing other people in outside of pure production roles until we absolutely needed to. So for example, one of our first not staff, but more of like a full time retainer was a gal named Morgan on the projects and operations side of things. And the difference that made when I talk about that jump from like, 200 to like 800.  That was the introduction of Morgan and operationalizing the process and having someone whose full-time job was the process. I think when you're so used to coming from a freelance thing where the work is the process and it's just you, you don't realize how quickly stuff breaks and needs to be reinvented and how quickly that becomes a full-time focus until you're in the thick of it. So we held off on that just too long. And once we had someone in that seat, the growth just exploded and the ability to focus elsewhere was colossal. So I would have brought an operations person in much, much earlier. I think By the same token, one of the lessons we're learning now years later, case studies, especially customer stories, are such a variable product and timeline. Namely because there's so many stakeholders inherent in it. There's you and your team, there's your client, there's your client's customer, and then within there, there can be lots of legal PR.  In the beginning, I really looked at this as like a productized business, like set a price, buy a thing, it's this much for a case study. And that worked until it really, really didn't work. Because now when you start to hire these fixed full-time staff, you're incurring overhead all of the time. Whether or not you can execute on that work or not, if a project hits pause and you've only billed $3,000 for it, every month that holds in pause, you're paying somebody to chase up on it and your margin gets eliminated. So I think I would have looked and tried to be more in tune with how the decisions we'd made around the underlying model of the business were influencing the business. But when you're growing, everything seems like it's going great. Like, well, we're growing. How could anything be wrong? And you kind of don't realize until you take a really close look, like, hey, there's some things we really need to address here.  I think one other thing I would mention, it's like the cliche You hear a lot of people talking about hiring slow, firing fast. I'm a people pleaser. I always want to give people the benefit of the doubt. I want people to win. You want every hire you make to work out. You want to believe that you made the right call. You want to believe that everyone can succeed and thrive and will find their footing.