TCC Podcast #444: Building a Simple Business with Justin Wise

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,...