TCC Podcast #452: Surviving an Economic Downturn with Topaz Hooper

What do you do when the worst happens in business? Are you prepared? In this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I spoke with copywriter Topaz Hooper about the steps you should be taking now to prepare for an economic downturn. The ideas we talk about here are good business practices even if the economy booms. But they become more important when things are uncertain. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: American Copywriter Co. Topaz's new Instagram The first interview with Topaz The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Research Mastery   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Are you prepared for the worst in your business… economic downturns, recessions, the loss of clients and ongoing projects? If not, this episode is for you. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. In today’s episode I’m catching up with Topaz Hooper who was a guest on the show several years ago. Topaz’s business has followed the trend that so many copywriters and other freelancers followed through the pandemic and afterwards. Most of us saw a nice bump in clients and revenues but then things started to change and she’s had to reinvent her business to adjust to the changes. We’ll get into that in the interview. Topaz also happens to be the second American expat who is living and working in The Netherlands that I’ve had on the podcast over the past couple of weeks. That wasn’t intentional, but maybe this was a hint that more of us could be living overseas and working with clients here in the states. I don’t know. The big topic we covered in this podcast is how to survive in a recession. We are not in a recession—at least as far as the general business cycle goes—at the moment, but there have been some difficult economic events that have scared a few people and caused them to predict that a recession is somewhere out there on the horizon. We are not predicting a recession, but we are talking about how to be prepared for it if it happens to come… maybe this year, maybe next, but certainly at some point in the future. But beyond the general economic environment, there have been micro effects in the copywriting world… things like A.I. taking on a lot of work, especially at the lower end of the spectrum. And some industries, finance and tech come to mind, have suffered their own downturns with layoffs and clients cancelling projects. So while these haven’t shown up in the overall macro-environment, what you see happening in your niche may be close to a what an actual recession might feel like. If you’ve felt that, you’ll want to listen to this whole episode. One more thing I want to mention, I talked about this topic—preparing for a recession—at The Copywriter Club In Real Life in 2020… that was right before the last mini-recession happened. Topaz and I talk about some of those ideas on this episode, but you can go even deeper with them in an article written by Anna Hetzel. I’ll link to that article in the show notes if you want to check it out. It’s worth reading. Before we jump into our interview, this is probably the last time I’ll mention this for a while but I want to share with you all of my research secrets… especially my 4:20+ research method that helps copywriters like you uncover the ideas and insights you need to write great sales copy. It’s part of Research Mastery which also includes more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, all of the questions I use to learn more about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself.  There’s a bonus on using Airtable to collect and sort your data and more… You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery… research mastery is all one word. Check it out now at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery. And now, my interview with Topaz Hooper. Topaz, welcome back to the podcast. It's great to have you here, excited for this discussion, talk, chat, whatever we're gonna whatever we're gonna call it, but you were here a few years ago episode number 305, catch me up. What has changed in your life since we talked about cruelty free copywriting and sales and all of those things. Topaz Hooper: So the first time we chatted, thanks for having me back, Rob. It's so good to be here. Yeah, life has changed quite a bit. Cruelty Free copywriter was my baby in 2021 I think I jumped on the pod, like you said in the 300th episode somewhere. And at that time, vegan food, plant based fashion, clean beauty were all rising and they were really heavily funded, and they needed copywriters everywhere. And I couldn't be everywhere, but I had a very good, successful business. And since then, you know, people are feeling a bit of a financial pinch these days, and those industries are not doing as well. So I've had to pivot quite a bit and launch new things and do new things. So I'm excited to get into how I'm sort of pivoting in this era of quasi recession, energy and maybe how others can learn from what I've done. Rob Marsh: Okay, this is really interesting, and I think it's going to be a really good conversation, because, like you said, things have changed. Especially here in the States, there's a lot of uncertainty about what's going to be happening tomorrow or next week, or what's not going to be happening. And things seem to be up in the air. There is talk of recessions, political policy, maybe bringing that faster or slower. But regardless of, even if you set all of that stuff aside, the business cycle itself, every 7 to 10 years, we go through some ups and downs. And this last cycle, we've had things like AI, we've had some layoffs in the tech sector because of that, which has brought more people into the copywriting world. And so before we start talking about some of the things that you've done to shift as you were looking at your business, what made you realize that things were changing? What were some of those first indicators where you're like, I need to start paying attention or like, for a lot of us, sometimes that just goes over our heads and suddenly we just don't have money, or we don't have clients, and we're like, Okay, we got a problem here. Topaz Hooper: Honestly, I was paying attention to my clients on social media. Every single client that I have, or potential client. I follow them on social, and I like all their stuff, and so the algorithm sends me all their posts. And I just started seeing more and more of my favorite brands closing. And I was reading time after time due to unforeseen circumstances, we're closing the business, or, due to this sort of difficult time to launch a company, or to grow a company, or, you know, import, exports, you know, all these sort of business owner terms, I started to see that people were just closing shop. They're just like, people aren't buying our shoes anymore, or people who don't don't have money for this extra special thing, and we're closing so I start to see this trend happening, probably like middle of last year, 2024, to about now, 3 or 4 years after the other started closing, and I started to look into why that was happening. And so that's when I started to get a little bit worried. Okay, you know, if these are the people that I know of, imagine all the other brands in my niche that I typically serve. What are they going through? I also started to pay a lot of attention to LinkedIn. Some bigger brands were closing meaty, which is a popular vegan mushroom brand, sold for less than their value this year. I think they were valued at 50 million and they sold for 4 million recently. Those are signs that, you know, my industry is not doing well. And so what I started to notice was my favorite brands were closing shop, and that's why my inbox started to sound a little empty, a little bit like a cave with an echo. And so that's when I started to think, okay maybe something's wrong. And so I kind of had to become a bit of a quasi economics professor, and start digging into what is supply chain, and what are factors that make businesses close or open, and what does this mean for my business? Rob Marsh: This is interesting. So obviously, we need to be paying attention to the industries that we're working in if we're seeing this kind of stuff happening in our industries as well. What do we need to be doing? Let's talk about recession proofing, or preparing for what could happen with an economic downturn.  Topaz Hooper: Yes, first of all, kind of circling back, you got to become an economics professor or something. I know many of us, we are in the copywriting business because we love writing, or we love marketing or we love sales. We're not economics people. Maybe we know how to do our bookkeeping, but we don't look at inflation necessarily. And in the context of our business. We might think of it in our homes, oh, the price of milk is up or something. But we don't think about, what does that mean for my clients?  You know, I think we all need to start reading the jobs report. We should all start listening to the federal Federal Reserve Chair. We need to all be looking at the growth trajectory of our niches in the last six months or a year. And so I think we all need to start putting on our economics hats, because that tells us why we're not getting clients. It's more so those factors that impact the businesses that we serve, and less about whether your marketing was good that day or whether your social post was seen. And so for me, the big recession proofing process has been just that deep dive. Is it me or is it the market? And when I started to realize it's not me, my website still converts, my emails are still good. The market's not doing well. I started to say, Okay, what do I need to do now?...