TCC Podcast #259: Building a Copy Agency with Chris Orzechowski

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Chris’s website

Full Transcript:

Kira:  Long time listeners will know this about us already, but occasionally we like to bring back quests who we’ve interviewed before to see what’s been going on in their businesses since the last time we chatted. Often business moves in ways they didn’t predict when we spoke a couple of years ago. And we’re doing it again this week. Chris Orzechowski is our guest for this episode of the Copywriter Club podcast, and as you’ll see Chris has a very different business than the one he talked about when we interviewed him before.

Rob:  But before we jump into this interview, this podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Think Tank, that’s our mastermind for copywriters and other marketers who want to think outside the box. Wow, we’re using a cliché to talk about thinking outside the box, that’s so inside the box. But, if you want to build new offers and revenue streams in your business, then the Copywriter Think Tank is the kind of place that might just be for you. So Kira, you asked me this last week, I’m going to ask you, why do you think the think tank helps copywriters experience real results?

Kira:  Yeah. What comes to my mind first is that we help copywriters go from feeling like a business owner and acting like a business owner and thinking like a business owner to feeling, thinking, acting like an entrepreneur. And we’ve talked about this frequently with our accelerator program where you can shift from a freelancer mindset to a business owner mindset. But once we’re in the think tank, and we’re working very closely with the copywriters in that room and they’re surrounded by 25 other copywriters who are ambitious and building businesses and restructuring models and figuring out how to do it in a way that works for them, that’s where that shift from business owner to entrepreneur really takes place. And we’ve seen it with the think tankers that have been in there and how they’ve grown even since they’ve left the think tank. So that’s the big shift for me that I’ve noticed, from the people that show up in the think tank.

Rob:  Yeah, I agree. If you want to be a great copywriter you study great copy writing. You surround yourself with good copywriters. But if you want to be a great business owner of a copywriting business, then you need to more than just copywriting. You need to study business principles. You need to be surrounded by people who are doing, not just interesting things, but successful things, big things, in their businesses. And that’s why something like the think tank helps so much. So I’ve you’re listening to us, talk about that. And if the Copywriter Think Tank sounds like something you’d at least like to know a little bit more about visit copywriterthinktank.com, fill out that form and we can just have a short call to talk about whether it’s right for you.

Kira:  Okay. Let’s hear from Chris about what’s been going on in his business since we last talked to him about two years ago. I believe it was episode 112 of the podcast. A lot has changed for him.

Chris:  I went from being a freelancer to having a simple team. And info products, a newsletter, all this just crazy stuff. A lot of growth. What happened was I was getting to the point as a freelancer where I’d done a lot of big multimillion dollar launches and worked for people like Jeff Walker and Tom Asraf, and I just started feeling like I just was doing the same thing over and over again. All these big launch projects, these webinars and everything, and it was fun. It was cool. But after a while I was just like, “I want another challenge. I want another mountain to climb.” I didn’t really know what I wanted that to be, but I just knew I wanted to see what else was out there.

So, I started obviously working on my own side of the business. Building my own list and creating products and those kind of things, which was cool. And it’s really exciting the first time you have an email list. I remember I did an affiliate promotion for Abbey Woodcock’s, one of her programs a couple years ago. My list was 273 people and I made 1,700 bucks. And I was like, “Holy crap, this is awesome. I can do this every week.” It was so cool. So I just knew that that was going to be the next step for me instead of just continuing to … Because there’s a few different paths that you can go. You can go super deep and become the high end freelancer and continue to raise your fees and the level of clients you work with. There’s nothing wrong with that. But for me I was like, “I want to see what else is out there.” Because I get bored. I want to hop around. I want to get my hands in different things.

So, I started doing that. I also started getting more leverage and removing myself from writing as much copy one on one for clients. I said, “You know what, I have this idea where I want to do an agency.” And I’m a big fan of mad men, so maybe that’s just reprogrammed my brain a little bit after watching it eight times. But, I was like, “You know what, I think I can do it.” And I was like, “Why not?” I’m 32 right now. When I started this agency, when I had the agency idea I was 29, 30. I was like, “What am I going to do for the next three decades? What am I going to do?” I don’t know, there’s nothing wrong with just continuing to do the same thing and becoming a master of the craft, but I was like, “I just want to see what else is out there.”

So, I said, I’m going to start an agency, and so I didn’t know when. But then COVID happened. And my son was born March 31 last year and it was crazy because we didn’t know if I’d be allowed in the hospital. I mean, I knew I was going to be there even if I had to elbow past the guard. It’s like, “I’m going to be in that room.” But there was a lot of uncertainty and my wife had to labor in a mask. There was this whole big … we didn’t know what was going on. It was very early on in the process. Everyone probably remembers what that was like.

And I remember I came home, I had this paternity leave plan. I was going to take two or three weeks off and do nothing. And with everything that was going on with the economy and the market tanked and all this stuff. I was like, “We’re taking zero days off.” I launched my agency the day I got home from the hospital. We put my son down for a nap and I got on the computer I said, “All right, let’s get some writers. We’ve got a few clients signed up. Let’s get it going.” And ever since then, just been pedal to the metal.

Rob:  So, I’m really curious about that process because I know there are a lot of our listeners that even if maybe an agency isn’t right for them now, they’re kind of thinking, “Hey, maybe someday the agency thing would work for me.” Or they’re working with clients and they’ve got enough work that they occasionally bring in a junior writer to help out with various things. So they’re almost to that stage. Talk to me a little bit about, okay yeah, you launched the agency but there’s a lot that goes into that. Let’s talk about the first steps but clients, writers, other help and all that goes into running a virtual agency.

Chris:  Man, it’s a lot. The main thing I can tell you is that you’ve got to know what you want out of it. You’ve got to know who you are, what you do, who you do it for. And what you want it to be. And those, it’s taken me 18 months to figure that stuff out. So it’s not like you listen to the podcast and then 10 minutes later you have it figured out. It’s going to take a lot of just going out there, closing deals, working on projects.

And I remember I was telling Kevin Rogers, who I do coaching with, I was like, “Man, every week I just get punched in the face.” Like just punched in the face with reality. Every week of all the lessons I learned as a freelancer, I had to relearn as an agency, which is the most frustrating and humbling thing ever in terms of rules of engagement with clients, like red flags and other things. Even stupid things like get your money up front. And a couple of times I didn’t do that and then it’s just a lot of things where like, “Oh my God, I know this lesson. I’ve learned this lesson … I’ve touched the stove, I know it’s hot. Why do I have to touch it again and burn my hand again?”

But in terms of the way you start out is you just start out very small, and you only hire what you need. So for me I knew that out of all the things in the agency, there’s a lot of different ways to build it. There’re agencies, like you think about old school advertising guys, you have an Ogilvy or you have a Gossage. So the Ogilvy is like he might, if he wants to, he’ll write and he’ll, “Oh, Rolls-Royce is coming in, and I want to write an ad for them so that’s going to be my project.” That would be his little pet project, his account. But he builds the team of writers and he is the name and the face and brings in the clients and sends them on down the pipe.

And then there’s the Gossage type agency where Gossage is the draw and he builds the agency around, it’s a support system for him and all the work funnels to him and his creative team. And there’s obviously all different kinds in between, but there’s those different models. And that’s what I mean when I say figuring out where you want to be, what you want it to look like. And then in addition to that, there’s also, do you want this to be an agency that’s going to be five million, 10 million, 20 million, 50 million, $100 million a year. What’s the level that you want to hit? You have to know that starting out. And that was one of those things I didn’t know and now I’ve determined what I want mine to be, because you’ve got to know where you’re going, because that’s going to affect the type of projects you do, the type of deals you structure, the type of clients, the order in which you hire a team. Everything single thing is going to fall in line.

And Austin Brawner was the one who first told me, he runs Ecommerce Influence podcast and the coalition and he’s a big eCommerce guy. And I was talking to him and he’s like, “There’re three kinds of agencies, there’s like the well agency, which they just want to bunch of clients and they’re just going for size. And so the owners can have a sellout one day and they can exit, they can merge with another agency or whatever it is. And they want to have the big business. And then there’s the boutique agency, which they only have a handful of clients and they go really, really deep with them and maybe they do rev shares or maybe they just do high end work and high end deals. It’s really custom bespoke. And maybe they only have two or three clients and have the team just to service those accounts. They work with them for years on end.”

“Then there’s the productized type service agency, which is you do the same thing. You solve this problem, here’s the solution. Here’s how you do it. You have your steps.” And then there’re obvious hybrids within all those approaches. But it’s figuring out what’s in those few models that I just mentioned who you’re going to be because that’s going to affect everything else you do from sales to marketing to operations to HR and finance and everything else from there.

Rob:  And so, I’m going to assume you landed on productized service agency or some combination of that, and maybe some boutiquishness, I don’t know. But what’s the financial goal?

Chris:  The financial goal for me I want to clear six figures a year from the agency in profit and I don’t really care if we get much bigger than that. I’m not trying to build … there have been points in this journey where I’m like, “You know what, we can do these kinds of deals, we could do this pricing structure and this kind of billable structure with the clients at this level and build this up.” But what I’ve done with the agency is every week it’s been a different thing. It’s been between learning the hard lessons, getting punched in the face every single week, it’s also like maybe this month we will work with folks and try to bring in these lower priced deals. Sometimes it’s like, no, those folks in the $10,000 month retains where we do our bespoke style of plain text, storytelling, brand, voice, emails like that. So I’ve hopped around and that’s the thing. For this process ideally you have to give yourself a little permission to hop around and say, “I need to explore this nook and cranny to see if this is actually where I want to go.

For us, we’re definitely more one foot in the boutique, one foot in the productize service, and that’s why also I don’t … This agency as it is doesn’t have to be a $100 million agency. And I don’t want to really build it with that intention because the certain thing too is, depending on the kind of work that you do, to get to that level you have to dilute it. You have to either dilute the work, not in terms of making it crappy, but there’s so many agencies out there, and I started to learn this, to where there’re agencies out there that they’ll have 300 clients and they’re going to send an email each week for that client, but they’ll just take the same email and swap out the header image and swap out one paragraph of text, and they just clone it 300 times and then they charge their client’s $2,000 a month, and that’s why they can charge that low of a price because they’re deliverable cost for that client is $100 a month because they’re paying a writer that they hire a clockwork $10 an hour.

So, you know what I mean? That’s where they are but … And that’s fine. I mean, I don’t care what people do. Good for them. But for us and the kind of work we do, we go deep with the brands. We pull out their stories. We either help them develop their brand voice or match their brand voice, and I love that kind of stuff we do and I love how we build the personality base copy around it. And that’s something that I never want to sacrifice. So for me I’m perfectly okay with keeping it bespoke, boutique, somewhat productized in terms that we know the core services that we offer and we don’t deviate too far from that. We can always just stay in our zone genius there.

Rob:  Yeah, I love that. And the focus that you bring to your agency makes a lot of sense. Somebody shows up and says, “Hey, I want help with a webinar”, you’re probably not the guy to do it. Even though you could, I’m sure write a great webinar, it’s not the focus. So what does a typical engagement look like for you? When the client comes in the door, what are we talking about as far as what that retainer looks like on a month to month basis? How much work gets done? What are you charging the client? Spill some of those details.

Chris:  So, retainers are usually between five and 10K a month, which is definitely … I didn’t know this at first but I’ve started talking to other people in agencies and they’re like, “You’re kind of at the high end.” And I was like, “Well yeah, we do high end work so I certainly hope so.” But usually that’s anywhere from 10 to 20 emails a month. And for eCommerce plans that tends to be a pretty good mix. I mean, there’re some brands out there where we’ve had some smaller retainer clients in the past where it’s like they’ll do seven emails a month. We’ll do seven emails a month. We’ll do an email a week and it will be three or four flow emails for them. We build it out slowly. So those are usually smaller deals.

But for a lot of clients who sell consumables, who have a decent amount of product line, usually between 10 and 20 emails. You might have anywhere from 10 to 14 broadcasts, or campaigns they call them, a month. And then a couple of flow emails that we’re either going to create from scratch or optimize. And then there’s obviously weekly revenue reports, analytics, those kind of things that get thrown in this ball. But, usually those are the range for those offers.

I mean, we’ve also done one-off projects too. We’ve gone back and forth for some clients. We really, our sweet spot and where I want to take in the future is more of the one-off projects. And those range anywhere from 6,800 to 18K. So it just depends on the size and the scope and they’re all a little bit different.

Rob:  And a typical one-off product, or project, sorry, you’re talking about setting up specific sequences that are going to last forever, right? It’s not just, hey, write a campaign for black Friday or maybe it is.

Chris:  We’ve done a few launches for clients where it is they’re a five figure, low five figure project and it’s a big launch. But most of the time, yeah, it’s queue automations. And essentially for a lot of these clients, sometimes we will set up some emails for them, a couple flows and things and they’ll start making extra … They have a client who’s making an extra 12 grand a month from one flow that we built. So it’s like, “Okay, would you pay us five grand for that one flow that’s going to produce 12K a month for you for however many years you run your business, if it stays the current level and doesn’t grow at all?” So that’s why we like the flows because it’s a good ROI for clients. It’s easy for them to see the value, and it’s one of those things where every day that they don’t have in place they’re losing money.

So, it’s not the only thing we’ve done, but for us, we just feel that’s our sweet spot in delivering the best value for people and giving them that asset that’s going to produce for them, because that’s what they want to buy. They want to buy an asset. They want trade money for an asset. They’ll trade money for campaigns and the jobs to be done type thing, but they’d usually rather have that in-house, and I don’t blame them, because there’s a lot of fixes that happen on the fly and oh, we need to change this promotion real quick. That happens. It’s the nature of business. You know how it is. But for us the automation is just the lowest stress, the most fun and usually the most lucrative.

Rob:  And then how are clients finding you? Again, agencies have different approaches to this, but often times especially the higher level agency where you’re charging those kinds of levels, it’s referral based. I’m curious if that’s how you’re finding your clients or if people find you through SEO or do you advertise your services? What does that look like?

Chris:  We’ve done all that. And the thing is they all work. It’s definitely some SEO. One of our first clients came from paid advertising, from You Tube actually. We’ve had clients come from Facebook. I’ve done trainings in other groups and presentations, webinars and things, we have clients come from there. A lot of referrals. Sometimes we’ll have clients who own a holding company where they’ll have multiple brands and then they’ll want us to work across the brands. So one client will turn into five projects. And then obviously I have my, I don’t know what is it magnetic field? The email list and the articles and the social stuff, and the books on Amazon. The combination of all that stuff together you just tend to grow this magnetic field where you get more impressions in the matrix essentially. So I think that’s part of it. Although that’s a little more abstract for people to understand. But it’s like you do a lot of stuff, people start knowing who you are and then opportunities come your way.

Rob:  Yeah. I want to come back to that because I think that’s something that I’ve watched you do over the last three or four years that is pretty amazing, so let’s come back to that. So before we leave the agency stuff, I’m also curious about your team. What size is it? How do you engage with them? Again, thinking of people who might be listening and are thinking, “Oh, I’d like to do an agency thing.” Obviously you don’t go out and hire five people, but at the same time you need people you can depend on. So how do you manage that spectrum?

Chris:  Yeah. And it’s hard. The thing is I’ve learned a lot, and you really learn a lot about yourself too, because if you … You’ve probably read The E-Myth. There’s the technician, the manager and the entrepreneur-

Rob:  Yeah, great book.

Chris:  Oh, it’s life changing. So I now know after going through this process. I was like, “Yeah, you get people, you manage them tell them what to do.” I’m a terrible manager. I learned that very early on in the process. I was like, “Man” … Some of my writers were like … I was like, “Okay, here’s the project, here’s deliverables. Here’s the big ideas that I’m thinking for the campaign, blah, blah, blah.” And hashing it all out and they’re like, “Okay, cool. When do you want this copy, boss?” Like, “I don’t know, whenever you can get it.” And they’re like, “What do you mean. Give us a due date.” And I feel weird doing that. I was like, “We’ve got to get someone whose job it is to manage the process.

And so, our team is 10 people and it’s according to the EOS system … which I love EOS and I’m sure you probably … you have a million books behind you, I’m sure you probably read those too … it’s phenomenal and like this accountability chart. So what I started to realize was a lot of sit in multiple seats. And it’s just going to happen, because you have a small team and until you have the size where you could hire one person for one seat with their five roles and responsibilities, you’re going to have some overlaps. Like with Angie Colee who’s our copy chief, now she … You probably know Angie, she was-

Rob:  Yep. Angie’s awesome. She’s been on the podcast and love her to death.

Chris:  Oh, she’s phenomenal. Yeah. She was my copy chief when I was at Jeff Walker’s, so obviously I know … I mean, she taught me how to write essentially, so she was leaving Jeff’s so I was like, “Hey, do you want a gig? I got a part-time” … And everyone’s part time, that’s the thing too. I was like, “We’ve got a part-time situation over here. We’ve got a few clients. I just need someone who can foster the writer’s growth and have eyes on every campaign.” Because that was the thing, I was just starting to get more clients, all the emails were running through me.

And it’s this big game of you start to realize you’re the bottleneck in every single process. And so it’s just solving one bottleneck every single week. So that was a big bottleneck. And once we got Angie in there, she did a phenomenal job. So she’s half copy chief and creative director and half account manager. And she liaises with the clients and she is like a unicorn I that regard. I will never find another Angie. That’s one thing I can say about it. She just knows how to handle the clients, knows how to have the tough conversations and set expectations and frame things. So she did a phenomenal job there.

And then we have Matt who was actually probably my first official hire. Matt Spangler, you probably wouldn’t know him in the copywriting world, but he’s just like I could throw any tech problem and he’s like, “Got it. Let me figure it out. Let me find a work around.” And he’s just good. He just knows like, “Okay, we’ve got these two softwares, here’s how we make them talk to each other. Here’s how we make them work. Here’s the workaround we’ve got to do.” It is like his brain just works that way. He’s brilliant in that regard. So any tech problem like, “Here you go Matt.” He takes that.

We have Cindy who my start off with my EA, now she’s my integrator. So she’s project manager, EA, but just really that integrator role in EOS and helps me just manage all aspects of the business. And she is the Asana queen and she also worked in a big agency before, a while back. And then I have six writers, Eddie Brune, Nick Yates, John Holtz, Amanda Lutz, Carrie Carr, Robert Lucas. And everyone is basically if we have a retainer client they’re on a retainer.

If we have one-off projects, which are 70, 80% of our projects, they get paid by the project and it’s like it’s almost a little bit of the Hollywood model. Where like when you go to make a movie, if you don’t own a studio, but you want to make a movie you hire a film crew, you hire an editor, you hire the actors, you hire the script writer. And everyone comes together, they do the project. You ship the project and then you can either do another movie or everyone goes and works on another, or whatever the case is. It’s kind of fluid, and for a while I felt bad. I was like, “I should have full-time people.”

But I’m in this mode now where I’m like, everyone talks about the future of work and what it looks like. And really, if everyone can just do what they’ve got to do and get their work done and do an awesome job, I don’t need you 40 hours a week. I just need you for when I need you and as long as you do a good job, I don’t care if it took you 10 minutes or 10 hours. I’d hope it takes 10 minutes for your own sake, but it’s that kind of mentality. So we’re completely asynchronous. We’re completely digital. There’s no traveling. It’s just basically, we don’t even have weekly meetings. We actually just started doing weekly meetings again after 18 months. But we didn’t have any weekly meetings. We would just meet up.

We got a project. Who has availability? Who is interested? We got the writers on the project. We do the kickoff call with the team. We do a kick off call internally and then we’re off to the races. Everything goes in Asana, everything is tracked, due dates and everything. The click stuff gets done, goes to Angie. Gives edit feedback. Edit’s made, shipped to the client. Client edits, shipped back, approved. QA’d, tested, scheduled, done. Boom.

Rob:  Awesome. And then last question while we’re talking about agency stuff. You mentioned Asana, are there other tools that you’re using to manage it or is it all happening through Asana?

Chris:  Asana, Slack, Zoom, Loom. Just those four.

Rob:  So yeah, so small team, a few tools and a great business.

Chris:  Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing. It’s like what you realize with an agency is there’s too main functions. It’s like you find people who have a problem and devise a solution for that problem and then you hire the team to solve that problem. Those are the two arms of the agency essentially. I mostly sit in the finding the people who have the problem and then coming up with the solution to the problem. And then most of what I hired for is people helping me solve the problem. So like I can write an email. I’ve written, I don’t know, 10,000 of them. I’ve done successful campaigns.

But for me, I viewed what is the thing I’m best at and my zone genius and the thing that I can help … My whole thing is what energizes me is going out and hunting the wooly mammoth and dragging it back to camp. Well, once it’s back at camp, I don’t want to skin it, chop it up, cook it and serve it to the village. I don’t want to do that part. I just want to go out and hunt all day. So that’s the realm that I stay in and I just always tried to say, anything that is not in that zone genius, I give to someone who is energized and excited and good at and can probably think of better solutions than I can because they have the bandwidth and the focus and the interest and possibly even the prior experience to help me with that.

Rob:  Yeah. I love it. It’s a great model. So let’s shift the conversation a little bit and talk about some of the products that you’ve built, because again, I think maybe you were coming out with the first product last time we talked. I can’t remember exactly where you were on that. But, you’ve got a couple of books. One that uses a bonus when your people join your newsletter. You’ve got your newsletter. I think you’re even doing some training stuff if I’m following your emails and seeing what you’re doing. Selling workshops, that kind of stuff. So talk about how that impacts your business and what you’re doing with all of those kinds of things.

Chris:  Yeah. So there’s this whole idea of selling, you look at like the logging industry and they generate saw dust and then they sell the sawdust and they put it into those little logs that you could throw into your fireplace and they put it in Impossible Burgers and other cellular stuff. They just take this essential garbage and put it in all these different places, sell it. They packed it in different places. Not that, that’s what we’re doing with the products, but it’s kind of the positive side of that idea. If you’re doing work, you have these bi-products, you create these systems. You create these results. You create all of these just bi-products of everything that you’re doing. The work that you’re doing. And what we’ve really done a good job of is we do something and we try to turn it into a SOP, standard operating procedure.

It’s like, “Okay, we have a process for getting results with clients.” That’s what my print and newsletter is. It’s like every month I just share a different campaign we’ve done that’s worked really well. So I’m like, “Here’s the campaign, here’s how it works. Here’s the framework for it. Here’s how you go do it for yourself.” It’s just always that process. So all the products, my first launch, my Email Copy Academy course, I’ve been doing this stuff high level. I’ve had retainer clients, I’ve done big launches. I’ve done all these things. I’ve worked a 100 plus clients at that point. So it’s like, “Okay, well there’s clearly a process here. Let’s just put it into a package.” And part of the process lives in your head, so you have to pull it out of your head.

And this is where my advantage is. And some people create products and they just, they suck. And some pre they create products and they’re really, really good. Like you guys have done an awesome job with all of our stuff and that’s why you have such a big following and get people such good results. Because there’s some people who get teaching and the art of taking that information, packaging it and selling it. And other people who just throw some slop together. And for me it’s my background as a teacher, that was one thing, I didn’t enjoy teaching, but I knew how to break something down.

I taught special ed. So I had to really break stuff down into manageable, digestible bite size chunks that I can give to someone. I had to teach kids to write who could barely write their own first name when I taught elementary school. So it’s like, how do you break a one page essay down to something that’s simple enough to where a third grader can get that, and get that skill, especially if they’re reading on a first grade level. So I took some of that knowledge about how to teach and always like, okay, what is the point of what you’re doing? How does it work. Break it down into the checklist or frameworks and then show examples and then give people the exercise to do.

So, every single product that we make is just that. We just say, “Okay, what do people need help with?” And it’s always when you look at what the demand is and people are asking me for coaching and asking me for all these other things. And I said, “You know what, I’m just going to create a course because people are asking for it. Let’s see how it sells.” And that was Email Copy Academy, that was my first course. And put a few hundred people through that. And that was a fun experience because I just got the basics down of like, what are the basics of … What are the foundational, fundamental skills of what I do when I sit down and write email sequence? And then soon I even added how I get clients and how I close those clients, talk to them on the phone. And it was a pretty big success.

Rob:  One of the books is Sleep While You Scale. I’m-

Chris:  Scale While You Sleep.

Rob:  Yes. Sorry, Scale While You Sleep. Yes. I guess, the same difference, but yeah.

Chris:  Too much information, I know.

Rob:  Yeah. Make It Rain, which is I don’t know, if you sell that one, but you use it as a bonus when people join. Talk about the process of writing those. Did you just take the course that you had and turn it into a book or did you go deeper than that?

Chris:  No, I just used Dean Jackson, I mean the books. And it’s funny because people are like, “I want to write a book.” I’m like, “Just pay Dean Jackson,” whatever, it’s three or four grand, whatever. I think back when I got it was 2,700. Which was still a lot. It’s nothing to sneeze at. But I said to myself, “Okay, I could pay this money and then be an author.” And that’s what I did. And no one else was an author. No one wrote a book on email marketing, so I said, “I’m going to be the guy that writes a book on email marketing.” And then I just did. And is it the best book ever written in the entire world? Does it rank number one on the New York Times best seller’s list? No. But does it need to be? Absolutely not. It gets the core of my philosophy and gives people some quick and instant wins and that’s all it needs to do.

So, I just did that and I just, part of it too is just a lot of copywriters who want to do this stuff, they just think they’ve got to be a somebody to go do it. But doing that stuff turns you into a somebody. That’s how it works. It’s not like I’m an expert one day, I’m going to write all these books. So email experts become experts, because they write books. It’s like they write the books and then people start seeing them as an expert.

Rob:  Yeah. Let’s talk about that process a little bit, because again, like I said, I sort of watched you do that. At what point did you decide you wanted to step out on your own and sort of be that expert in the space. If I remember right, it started happening when you did the back and forth with Kim Schwalm. But maybe even you had roots before that. Talk about especially your intention in building that and how you’ve gone through that process.

Chris:  Yeah. So originally I started doing all that stuff because I wanted to create a mote around my business. And say if I had a lot of content … I noticed all these guys that I learned from, you look like Dave Kennedy and like Frank Kern, all these people I looked up to. It’s like, well they have all this stuff. They’ve got these websites and they’ve got these articles, and they have these funnels. I’m like, “I bet if I wanted to hire them for anything, it’s going to be a lot of money.” And I said, “Okay, there’s definitely a correlation there.” Even though not an exact science, but there’s a correlation.

So, I said, “Okay, I need to produce content.” And obviously a lot of this, Kevin Rogers influenced in terms of teaching me about the importance of authority content, but I started back in 2016, I think January 2016 was when I first started publishing. And no one knew who I was, nor should they. I didn’t really do anything at that point. I was just writing articles. I’d probably written 100 articles before any significant amount of people even knew who I was.

But I realized if I just keep on writing, eventually I’ll probably get pretty good. Eventually, what am I going to write 1,000 articles and they’re all going to suck. Probably not. A few of them will probably be decent enough. I had done blogging before I started copywriting so I understood a little bit about, people like reading interesting stuff. So if I just write interesting stuff, more people start to follow me and know who I am. So the things is, I didn’t really know what I was doing. And even nowadays, it’s still like you figure it out a little bit more each and every day, but it’s like it just, the momentum. And it’s just like if you continue to write stuff, the first 20 articles might suck, but the next 20 might be pretty decent. And the 20 after that might be really, really good and people might love your stuff after that.

I just knew that, that’s was … I don’t know if that was true for everyone, but that’s always been true for me. The first book that I … I think it was okay. I think the second book was better. And I think the third book that I write is going to be phenomenal. But I’m not going to get to the phenomenal book number three until I write books number one and two. And the same thing as blogging and all the content stuff. So the goal with that was to say if I just write enough content, eventually I’ll have a blog. I might get some SEO if I stumble into it, and I have. Or at least I’ll have enough experience writing.

Or part of it too I remember back, it was like, when I was talking to clients, I did this thing where I was like, “Oh, it’s funny, I actually published an article about this recently.” They were like, “Oh, you did?” And I published it on my blog. It doesn’t matter where it’s published, it’s published. Because there’s something about that air of authority. I don’t know what it is. But it’s this weird human, like the way that we perceive experts and information. You know what I mean. I don’t know how to describe it really, but people are like, “Oh wow, this person publishes articles, so clearly they’re good at this.” And just knowing that one fact I said, “I’ll just publish a lot of articles.” And then I can say, “Hey, here’s an article I published. Check it out.” Because if I’m competing against you and you have no blog and no articles, and I have articles, I’m going to win that gig.

Rob:  And then obviously that turned into books, speaking gigs, even more stuff as you’ve moved forward. So do you, at each step do you think, “Okay, got the blog. Got the articles, now it’s time for a book. And got the book, now it’s time for events.” Or what’s your thinking there?

Chris:  So, part of it is like people talk about getting lucky. And a little bit of it’s getting lucky. I’m not one of these people who’s like, “It’s all this hard work.” It is a lot of hard work, but it’s also getting lucky. But the way you get lucky is by continuing to put yourself in the arena every single day, every single week. So I published a weekly article for years. And it wasn’t until maybe the second half of that process where all the opportunities started coming my way. Because when people see that you’re consistent and they know that you’re building the list and you’re getting momentum and so everyone … It’s not riding coattails, but they want to be on the rocket ship with you.

So that’s when opportunities start coming at … And the once you get the list, now you have the asset. And other people, like when if they have an affiliate offer, if they have a webinar, if they have a book go launch, if they have a summit, the bigger your list gets and the bigger your following gets, the more of those people you attract because they have a bigger asset that they can leverage themself. And that’s the way it is. There’s nothing wrong with it. It just that’s the game. If Seth Grodin wanted to promote your thing, that’d be awesome because he has a huge audience. That’s just the way it is.

If people start to say, “Okay, well who is starting to gain steam, momentum, and where is the impressions?” You talk about impression in the matrix, in the media matrix. Where is all the attention going. So the more of that stuff you start doing, the more attention you start attracting. The more people will get onto your list. The bigger your list grows, it’s like it just snowballs after a while in terms of the opportunities that you get. So part of it was just seeing like, “Wow, I’m doing more stuff and more people are starting to know about me and my blog and everything. And people are joining my list and now the list is 800 people and now we broke 1,000. Now we’re at 1,400 and then we launched a course, now we have 1,700. And then it’s now today, it’s only 4,500 or so, but it’s 1,800 customers. Or more than that actually, maybe 1,850.

So, it’s a significant amount of good list quality. But that’s the way it happens. It’s just part of in the beginning you take the small opportunities. Like I was going on podcasts that had zero subscribers. People were just launching. I was doing all those things because I said, “You’ve got to do this stuff before you get to the big leagues.”

Rob:  It’s great to have Chris back on the podcast, and if you’ve been listening along you know he’s shared a ton of really good ideas. I in particularly really like the deep dive that he did on just building an agency. Thinking through what he wanted. The number of times that that changed. All of the roles in the agency. The challenges that come along with that. The businesses that he’s built. Setting goals around that. It really is almost like a master class on building your own agency, whether you just want to be a 1% agency with a few contractors, or whether you want to build something bigger with partners and perhaps even full-time employees. I think what he’s laid out here is a pretty good roadmap for at least thinking through what it is that you want. So that’s the big thing that stood out to me from that, from the last few minutes, Kira. How about you, anything jump out at you?

Kira:  Yeah. I’m what I love about Chris and how he’s grown is that he’s taking on new challenges in his business. And he’s grown so much from the last time we chatted with him on the podcast. And it’s just really cool to hear him talk about another mountain to climb and finding that next challenge. Because even though for him, it’s one thing and it’s building his agency, and he’s doing it and it’s happening and he’s dreaming big and he’s actually doing the work to get there. But for all of us it’s different and my dream is going to look different than your dream, than someone else’s dream. So it’s just a good reminder that we can all look for the next challenge and that there is no set path for this thing that we all do as copywriters.

And it’s okay