TCC Podcast #262: Filling Your Lead Pipeline with Jacob Suckow

• How Jacob went from working with the Seattle Seahawks to working in cookie dough sales.
• The method Jacob used to grow cookie dough sales from 25k to 4 million in a matter of a few years.
• How a pivot landed him working with companies like McDonald’s and Disney.
• The moment he realized he needed to be his own boss.
• Creating a pipeline to keep clients rolling in.
• Why building your network is your greatest funnel resource.
• Switching roles from freelancer to strategist. What’s the difference?
• How Jacob reverse-engineered how to make 100k a year without working 80 hours a week.
• Why letting go of clients will benefit your business and help it grow.
• The kind of clients that make for high-income months.
• Is there a mindset trick behind making six figures?
• How to fill your pipeline with ‘ready to go’ clients.
• What 15-minute connections can do for you and your business.
• The steps to building a solid network.
• Why you should build an audience even if you have nothing to sell.
• The key to being loud in your industry.
• How to create offers that people want to buy. What’s the method to the madness?
• Where do offers go wrong and how can they be fixed?
• The upside to being able to create your own offers.

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Jacob’s website
Kickass Copywriting by Jacob Carlton
Skip the Line by James Altucher

Full Transcript:

Kira:  When you’re still learning the ins and outs of your business, the last thing you want to worry about is where your next lead is coming from. We’d prefer a lengthy line, kind of like the line outside the Apple store when Apple released the new iPhone 13. That’s the kind of line we want, filled with dream clients just waiting to work with you.

Our guests for the 262nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast gives us the lowdown on lead generation so we can create a demand for our copywriting services and hopefully never stress over finding clients again. Our guest, Think Tank member Jacob Suckow, is a copywriter and launch strategist who skyrocketed his business within months by creating a full pipeline of leads.

But before we jump in, I’d like to introduce my co-host for today’s episode, TCCIRL speaker, “two-peat” speaker at TCCIRL and then a podcast guest from way back, Episode 13, long time ago, conversion copywriter, funnel optimizer and growth ecosystem designer, Sam Woods. Thanks for being here, Sam.

Sam:  Thanks for having me, Kira. It’s good to be speaking with you.

Kira:  Yeah, I’m excited to co-host this with you. Before we jump in, though, can you just share a quick update of what you’ve been up to over the last few months in your business?

Sam:  Yeah. It’s a mixed bag of things. Over the past year or so, taking a step back and only worked on a handful of more in-depth projects. I think either you’re a copywriter and you do a lot of smaller projects or you do a few big projects or maybe you have a mix. But for me, it’s been only a few handful of deeper projects with various companies. It’s still with copywriting, still optimizing different ways that they’re acquiring customers and been working on some barge campaigns. So it’s been nice. It’s been a nice break from the smaller type projects, nice to set those aside and deep dive into a few things. I think I prefer the mix. It’s nice to go back and forth.

Kira:  Yeah. When you say bigger projects, do you mean in terms of not only deliverables, but length of time you’re working with clients or are you working with them for six months to a year in this capacity?

Sam:  Yeah, pretty much. Bigger scope in terms of what the project is, the pieces involved and also, the length of time for however long you work with them. For me, with the projects, a few projects that I worked on, they’re probably 10 to 12 months long projects, I would think, about on average what they’ve been like. It’s been nice.

Kira:  Okay, cool.

Sam:  Okay. Well, before we jump into Jacob’s interview, Kira, let’s hear a word from our sponsor.

Kira:  It’s me again, I am a sponsor. Actually, our Think Tank Mastermind is our official podcast sponsor. The Think Tank is our private mastermind of copywriters and other marketers who want to take massive action inside their businesses. Whether that’s taking on bigger clients or creating new offers within their own businesses, our Think Tankers have been able to take massive leaps within months of joining. If you want to find out more about this mastermind experience, go to copywriterthinktank.com.

Sam:  All right. Well, let’s dive into this episode and find out how Jacob started his journey.

Jacob:  So, it’s a long journey and I’ll try and shorten it so we don’t lose anybody here. But it all started with a desire to be a chiropractor, actually. About seven years ago, at this point, I think it’s what I was going to school for. Was a degenerate for two years, even though that’s not a major. But after diving in really hardcore into the medical profession and wanting to own my own business, that’s what I thought I wanted to do, got hooked up with a great doc, got an internship at the Seahawks. It was really cool stuff and worked at it for about eight months and found out I absolutely hated it.

At that point, I had been working with a close friend of mine for a little while who was actually starting an edible cookie dough company. Yeah. And he asked me, he said, “I don’t really have a job title, but I’d love to have you on full-time to do something and sales and marketing. Do you want to do it?” and I said yes and hopped in and took on all of the awful, ugly jobs alongside building out our econ channel, as well as breaking into wholesale, did some really big scale, B2B sales and things along those lines for about two years. It was a ton of fun.

We grew from doing like 25K to a couple of million a year in like four years and my daughter was born and traveling all the time for different conferences, different meetings. It was way too much. And so, next pivot is an HR SaaS company out of Chicago and they’re doing really great things in something similar. Apparently, I can’t say no to a indiscreet job offer because there are deals that they wanted to make a pivot in who they were selling to and how they were doing it and they needed somebody to take on handling the messaging, as well as starting to build out a small team to do the actual outbound sales.

I said, yes. We saw a lot of success there. Brought on some big clients like Boeing, McDonald’s, Disney, closed like 400-500,000 in that first couple of months and it was a ton of fun. And then about eight months into that, I realized that I’d started to hate that too. I turned it inward and said, “Well, Jacob, maybe the problem is you. Maybe you’re just not employable.” Now, I got a little bit of a laugh out of it, but I was starting to get a little bit restless. I was getting on edge and angry and just not who I really wanted to be for myself and for my family. So I decided to really look back and think introspectively and say, “Okay, if I wanted to do something on my own, what skills do I have right now where I could freelance, I could consult, I could start to build out some products on my own?”

The thing that I’ve always loved is sales, is marketing, is creating messaging. The thousands of people can understand and enjoy and see much, to get some help no matter what the product is. I read Gary Halbert’s book, The Boron Letters, and that was my first foray. And I said, “Okay, cool. I’m 100% on board with this thing.”

I’d been familiar with copywriting from before we used to, it was funny enough, we used to go to trade shows and we’d collect a bunch of emails and a bunch of different contact names like everybody else does. Except after the show, everyone who was on our list would get some very John Carlton-esque semi-aggressive, a little bit pushy, very funny, a little bit raunchy type newsletter sent over like two weeks. We actually did pretty good with it.

We’d have ice cream shops, pizza parlors, any other kind of small restaurant you could think of ordering from us left and right, just from this quick automated email campaign. Leaning into that, it was really cool to see those numbers start to come up as well as anything with our econ. I thought that I could pull it off. I leaned in for the last three or four months that I was at my job and matched my salary and then I decided to leave full time last November and I’ve been doing it since then. I had a great first month that was insanely unsustainable and since then, ran into copy hackers and have found your guys’ community, copy chiefs too. Since then, it’s just been a focus on marketing strategy, funnels and copywriting and not turning back.

Rob:  Jacob. I’ve got lots of questions about all of that first, what’s your favorite flavor of edible cookie dough?

Jacob:  Yeah, no question. It’s something that we called Monster. It was chocolate chip, oatmeal, peanut butter and coconut and it’s the best cookie I’ve ever had in my damn life. I will fight anyone who thinks otherwise. It’s amazing. If you haven’t had anything like that, you can make it yourself. You can go find out and buy it, but it’s a problem.

Rob:  All right, I’m going to have to track some of that down. And then you referred to the email campaign, the Carlton-esque email campaign. Is that something that you wrote? Or did somebody else write it and you thought you could emulate it?

Jacob:  No. So I read, I think the name of the book is Kick Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel, that’s one of his flagships, and To a Tee. I read through that book and followed a couple of guided exercises that he’s got set up in there and we wrote them that way. So I wrote those and would tweak them very slightly over like a year or two. They had really no place in the industry that we were in. I think that was kind of the fun. It was a little bit contrary, a little bit off kilter, pretty funny. That kind of lens into my personal style, too, and pretty humorous and a little obnoxious and for whatever reason they worked.

Kira:  I was just going to ask about being a chiropractor. It kind of makes me think of like, kitchen confidential, chiropractor confidential. What happens as a chiropractor or what lessons did you learn? What are the secrets of being a chiropractor that most of us don’t think about or know?

Jacob:  Yeah. They’re super personable people and funny enough, and it’s one of the reasons that they’re targets of a lot of other different marketing agencies is they’ve got the potential to do an insane amount of business if they’re very good at leveraging referrals. I think the most interesting thing that nobody thinks of is that chiros, PTs, local doctors of all kinds, they run on referrals and affiliates and any other kind of partner networks that they can be a part of. That’s super interesting.

On the not marketing side of things when it comes to being really good, they’ve got processes man. They know how to show up and get in a routine and crank things out in a very short period of time. They’re very efficient, very un-distracted and very on point, which is something that I am none of. So it was kind of doomed from the start to be fair.

Rob:  That makes sense. You talked about how you wanted a proof of concept before you left your job, it took four months to match your salary. What was it that you were doing to find clients and identify the problem that you can solve for them?

Jacob:  Yeah, a lot of it was looking on Upwork. Also leveraging just my own audience and network. I wasn’t shy about it. From the beginning. I told people that this is something that I was leaning into doing. I had probably 30 or 40 conversations with just other marketers that I ran into on LinkedIn and said, “Hey, this is what I’m thinking about doing. I see that you’ve kind of got some leverage and a really good reputation in the space here. I’d love to pick your brain if that’s something you’d be open to.”

Just these no pressure, networking conversations that would get me introduced to really good people who had tons of insights to share that were years beyond what I would have experienced if I’d waited on my own find that kind of information. And then at the same point in time too, there were great sources for referrals to people who were looking for, I mean, at that point, really cheap help and somebody who was willing to get their hands dirty on an unattractive project or that didn’t have the budget. I was just willing to do just about anything at that point.

Kira:  How did you take the edible cookie dough company from 25K to a couple of million. I know you did a lot of things. But for anyone who wants to follow that path and do something similar, what are two to three big takeaways?

Jacob:  Yeah, big takeaway number one, at least for me, is to stay far away from CPG products. I’m joking slightly. It’s a hell of an industry. And so I can’t take full credit for doing everything else. My partner’s the original founder and he did about 85% of the legwork. Most of what I came in and did was scale and sales. And so it was finding different distributors across the country that we could work with.

There’s a lot of B2B outbound relationship building type sales. We would travel all the way across the country, we do all kinds of different trade shows, lots of cold emails, lots and lots and lots and lots of cold emails and cold calls over the years that really just helped us get into a couple of pivotable partnerships that grew exponentially. Because one deal for us wouldn’t just be another store, it wouldn’t just be another couple of cases in sales. Most of what we’re doing was commercial. And so it’s a difference of 10-20-30-40-50, couple of hundred thousand dollars a year on a single deal.

Rob:  Okay, so let’s talk about how your business has evolved since then. You went full time, not too long ago, about a year ago. What has happened in your business that has allowed you to move forward as quickly and work with the kinds of clients that you’re working with today?

Jacob:  The number one thing for me thus far has been to have a really loose grip on what I kind of identify my business as. Initially, the first title that I have for myself is freelancer, that’s what I want to do. I want to go out there and I want to provide a service for somebody else that either doesn’t necessarily have the knowledge or the same skill set to do so or they really just don’t want to waste the time to do it right. Coming in as a freelancer, I noticed a couple of things.

One, my job is really kind of to take orders, grab a brief and spin something up. It’s very cut and dry, very black and white, very little strategy and creative input on my end in the bigger picture. I realized pretty early on that I wanted to have a little bit more of that involvement. I loved a lot of the more strategic value that I could bring to the table in any scenario. I had to figure out a way to make that more of what I did. And so where my initial position was working very strictly with B2B and SaaS companies to work on their top of funnel and outbound messaging, I realized I didn’t want to work with pretty much any of those folks. Not that there’s anything wrong with them and there’s a lot of money to be made in that niche and some very, very good people who work with those kinds of companies.

But it didn’t fit my personality. What I had to dial back and think is, I love working with people who are similar to me. I know that there’s a lot of us out there who do. And so if I love working with people who are similar to me, what are some of the traits, attributes and goals that I want to help other folks that identify with that. I realized I wanted to work with solopreneurs, I wanted to work with ambitious people who were trying to pave their own way, escape from the nine to five, the rat race, whatever it is that you want to call it and start to build something of their own because what I learned in my first month… I was doing like 80 hours a week but my first month full time cleared 11K was that my initial goal coming into this is I’d love to do six figures in a year and I found out very early that that was so much more approachable than most people make it out to be.

The whole goal since then has been how to reverse engineer that in a way that’s sustainable, it doesn’t take up a ton of time out of my week and not working 60-70 hour weeks in order to do so. Each step along the way for me and I don’t necessarily recommend it for everybody, but it’s kind of coincided with letting go of clients. Letting go of relationships that have been good for both sides but just don’t make sense in the long run and it’s a disservice for me, if I’m trying to grow my business in a different direction to string someone along who doesn’t fit that mold, because what’s going to happen over time is I’m either going to resent the work, they’re going to get less of a priority, it’s always just been to try and stop that before that becomes an issue for me.

Rob:  Okay, so I’m really curious, because you mentioned the 11K a month. I want you to break that down for us, because that’s your very first month, you’re already on track for six figures. I know you said 80 hours a week, but break it down almost project by project, how you got to 11K in in the first 30 days.

Jacob:  So that’s first 30 days full time. I want to make that really clear. That would probably be my sixth month in-ish. But most of that came really timely and pretty lucky agency-type contract. I was working with two agencies on retainer who had an insane amount of business at that time. It’d be a flat base fee of like 1,500 bucks a month, like nothing crazy, plus another add in for any additional projects that came in. So it would be a couple of hundred dollars for a small website, here a couple of hundred dollars for a landing page here.

Between those two agencies, it netted me about $3-4,000. And then I also started working with another agency that was focused on doing B2B outbound and building these kind of outbound engines for more non-traditional companies or those who might not have the budget to build out a sophisticated sales and marketing team for themselves. The relationship that we had worked out there was that there was an initial startup and consulting fee for every single client that came in.

Where I would come in and we would run kind of an onboarding diagnosis session and get everything that we needed to have messaging for those folks to run email campaigns, cold calling campaigns and retargeting campaigns for like six months. Since that was a little bit more involved, it was also the first time that I included strategy into any of the pricing that I was doing. That’s where the majority of that $11,000 came in. I think it was $7,300 and some change off of that one because their business just so happened to be exploding right when we started working together. And I also knew this coming on. That was where an insane amount of value came from. Also a lot of headache and late nights but I’m very, very grateful for all of it.

Kira:  So, you said six figures seemed approachable to you. I don’t think it seems as approachable to a lot of copywriters listening. Can you reverse engineer that for us and just share kind of how you’re approaching it and maybe the cornerstones of it? Or just the parts of it that would help us achieve that six figures.

Jacob:  Yeah, for sure. It didn’t seem anywhere near approachable to me until that month that we just talked about. Because before that, I was bringing in $2-3-3,500 a month that would be coming in. What made it seem approachable was that in one given month, I could have all of my expectations completely blown out of the water by a couple of chance things going really well.

I think what that meant for me was that one, having a full pipeline was going to be insanely important. I come from a really hardcore sales background. So that’s always been something that’s very back of mind for me is how do I keep a network of at the ready at any given point in time. Referrals, am I doing cold pitches at the same time? Am I networking with other folks who might be good referrals for the future? Am I trying to make active referrals for people in my network so they’re continuously trading these things back and forth. It’s how do I keep up with that long term, so that I can try and flex my pipeline when I need it.

Also, to be able to give back to other people. Because if I’ve got a full pipeline that I can’t necessarily serve, because I’m overbooked, that simply means that these are more referrals that I can be able to hand over and pass along to other great copywriters that I’m running into and communities like other ones that I’ve been in and like yours. So when it comes to actually breaking down the numbers and what it looks like to make that approachable, is at the end of the day, even if you’re starting off doing a $2,500 service, really, that’s only four projects in a given month that can be completed at a given time.

The goal then becomes okay, if I have four projects that I need to be able to hit my revenue goal, how do I have eight opportunities coming into the month? What does that look like? I found out that being preemptive and looking at each month, not necessarily only by projects booked but by opportunities that were active was really a big priority for me. Even if my next month was full or my next two months was full, what I’ve always been obsessed with is trying to fill up the next third month out or fourth month out at that point.

Rob:  How do you do that? How do you keep the pipeline full? What are you doing on a daily basis to make sure that you are booked out 8-12 weeks ahead?

Jacob:  Yeah, so a lot of it’s networking. I am a massive believer and I was just actually talking to somebody about this today, I hate the quote that your network is your networth. But I firmly believe it too. I also believe that cliches tend to come about because they’re true and there’s a lot of truth to them. For me, what that looks like is anytime I’m running into someone on any platform that I’m on, whether it’s on LinkedIn, it’s on social, if we’re doing a podcast, I actually try and make a 15 minute connection with as many influential people as I possibly can.

Obviously, we can’t do that with everybody. But it’s something that you guys encouraged inside of the accelerator, inside of the underground, inside of the Think Tank is to continuously be connecting with people without an agenda so that there are opportunities out there on a regular basis. Because what happens is if I see my pipeline starting to fall apart and I’m actually kind of in this position right now, where my September’s looking lighter than August, July and June have by far. And so a big priority for me right now is reaching out to people that I’ve connected with in the past three months to say, “Hey, I’ve actually got some unexpected openings and I remember when we talked that you said you were pretty close with a lot of folks in this industry. Any chance you know somebody who’s looking for some help with this, this and this?” Whatever offers it is that are currently running.

That’s kind of what my biggest priorities have looked like. I know it sounds counterintuitive because it’s not super scalable, at least on the front end, but it’s paid off massive dividends for me just to be connected and always trying to help other people inside of my network too. I think the second thing on that, too, is the challenge for me is if I’m thinking of asking someone for a referral, is thinking, “Okay, cool. Where are there two or three referrals in my network that I can give to somebody else?” And trying to continue to replenish this circle. It’s a little woo to think about it that way. But it’s worked out insanely well for me, at least up to this point.

Rob:  Yeah, I like you’re talking about connecting with your network. But let’s also take a step back from that. How do you build your network? What are you doing to make sure that that’s growing all the time, so that you can reach out to them when things get a little slower or when there’s an opportunity to work with you, a window opens up, that kind of thing.

Jacob:  Yeah. I’m a big proponent of building an audience whether or not you have something to sell, because we all have something to say, whether it’s in marketing, whether it’s in sales, whether it’s in graphic design or it’s just simply a lifestyle kind of thing. People love to keep up with each other. I’m subscribed to probably 30 to 40 plus different newsletters. When it comes to building that audience, it’s always, always, always a primary focus to grow an email list. This is what everyone’s preaching right now. So then the number one question is, how do you go about doing that and how do you go about doing it differently if you don’t necessarily have this traditional funnel to direct people into where you’re paying into ads, into some sort of a small offer and rolling it in that way.

Well, another way that you can do that is with everyone who is potentially in your network or who you want to be connected with, have something to offer them to where you can get them onto that email list. For me right now, obviously, it’s a lead magnet. But before it’s saying hey, I love connecting with other people that are copywriters, designers, other kinds of solopreneurs because I know there’s opportunities that I have left and right and simply cold reaching out to these folks and asking, “Would you be open to a quick 15 minute conversation?” Talk to them and in the middle of the call in a very weird and direct and organic way, simply asking like, “Hey, I actually send out a newsletter too where I talk about this, this and this and whatever it is that you’re focused on.” And gathering, starting to build a list slowly that way.

Because it doesn’t need to be 12-13-14-1,500 people to start. Even if there’s only 35-45-50 people that are on your list and they’re all people that you know and half of them are relatives, these are still people that you can share your ideas with and stay present top of mind because the odds that someone’s going to give you a referral for a copywriting job if they don’t know that you’re writing copy. If they don’t know that you’re working with course creators or coaches or SaaS companies, then they can’t make those referrals for you. I think at the end of the day, it’s about making it easy for your network to know what you do and who you help and then just being loud about that and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable and giving a microphone to whatever ideas that you have.

Kira:  How else are you being loud about that right now? You mentioned in your list and then you’re connecting and networking. What else are you doing right now to be really loud?

Jacob:  Yeah, right now a big focus for me is actually… I’m a pretty passionate, anti-time based launches right now. So I’m really interested in evergreen funnels and big transitions that are going on right now in the world of marketing to make more and more and more offers evergreen and to find a way to build an ecosystem of evergreen offers that sell into each other in a circular fashion that’s a little bit more organic instead of the more traditional stepwise offer ladder kind of thing.

So that’s a really big thing for me right now. And then at the same point and time, too, I’m actually just trying to overshare as I’m building my business, have changed my goals a little bit to be a little bit more focused on not only revenue but on the amount of hours that I’m working in a week. I’ve got a goal within the next 12 months and this it was when I joined the Think Tank to hit 250K and to do that working 30 hours a week. I’m also sharing everything that I’m doing on my own to make that a possibility, different workflows that I’m using, changes that I’m making in my schedule, what I’m prioritizing my time on. How I’m being more efficient, how I’m recycling content.

In short, being loud about a lot of things, but at the end of the day, it probably comes down to contradictory marketing. I like to go a little bit against the grain and so that tends to be the type of things that I talk about.

Kira:  All right, let’s cut in here and talk about a few things that stood out so far. So Sam, as you’re listening to the conversation with Jacob, what really stood out to you?

Sam:  A bunch of things. One of them being or feeling like he wasn’t employable, the hustle mode, the transitioning from freelancer to strategist, working with people and finding out who you want to work with, reverse engineering. There’s a lot in there that I either recognized from my own experience, over the past, I don’t even know, eight years or so nine. I can’t even count.

There’s a lot of things that I’ve experienced or dealt with one way or another. I think the unemployable part is something that I’ve seen more so later in my career, if you want to call it that. Starting off I thought, I can get in any job I want really, that I want to get. I can go to interviews and I can get the job and do the job and whatever, but the more I’ve worked with different companies over the years, I’ve realized with myself which is that I couldn’t do a traditional job. I feel unemployable, not because I’m… I don’t think I’m a difficult person. I’m sure others will disagree with him.

I just think that I am. But I feel unemployable because I just couldn’t stick with probably the rigorous scheduling that people do and meetings on top of meetings on top of meetings and having meetings all day long. All that stuff, I just… The way I work is individualized to myself, I think. I’ve found a good routine. I found good habits that work really well for me but it just wouldn’t… I wouldn’t fit in anywhere else.

Kira:  Yeah, yeah. I feel the same way. I guess if I was forced to get a job-job, I could probably make it work. But I think for me, it’s like, I really appreciate the flexibility with scheduling and how I’ve been able to grow my family during this time and have that flexibility. It would be really hard to go backwards and then adhere to someone else’s schedule.

Granted, there are good jobs where you have more flexibility. But I feel like this is one space when we decide to jump into copywriting and start our own businesses where it’s hard. It’s hard to go backwards. It feels tougher, but I know some copywriters do that when they join agencies to really get that that foundational experience that they may have been lacking when they first started their own business.

Sam:  Yeah. I think some people probably should never start their own business, if that makes sense.

Kira:  Right. There’s also that.

Sam:  Yeah, some people they just… It’s not good or bad or right or wrong, it’s just finding what works for you and starting your own business of a freelance type business or something else. Maybe that is just not what you should be doing. It’s nothing wrong with that. It’s better to find where you fit in and where you do your best work and where you’re enjoying life than to struggle and to spend years wasting time and energy pursuing something that you’re not going to be happy with. Speaking of time, working 80 hours a week, been there done that and not going back to it, but it’s something else I recognized from what Jacob said.

Kira:  Yeah, he talked a lot about time and creating a business where he can believe his goal is to make 250K in the year working 30-ish hours a week, somewhere around there, but a much more manageable schedule than the crazy hours that he’s worked in the past. Yeah, I’m just wondering, Sam, how have you evolved your schedule over time? Since you’ve been in business for a while, what is the ebb and flow of your hours that you work?

Sam:  I started off doing the hustle thing, I think I don’t know if it is completely avoidable. I think most people end up doing some form of hustling in the beginning. Because if you’re trying to get something off the ground, you’re dealing with inexperience. So there are things you just don’t know yet. I think most people go through a hustle period and hopefully most people also get out of that period. I did. I think the past three or four years, I don’t think I worked more than 20, I don’t know, 20, maybe 30 hours a week, something like that.

I got to sit down and really think about how many hours I spend. But if I was to quantify it, I think I’ve transitioned definitely transitioned away from the 80-60 hour hustle mode into something that’s more sustainable. I think that just comes down to knowing how to transition through the different stages of your business. You start off as a one person, one man or one woman band where you’re playing all the instruments, but eventually, what a friend of mine says, you want a business orchestra, which sounds really cheesy. But you’d rather be the conductor of an orchestra than to be the street musician with a full-on band setup, I think.

Kira:  I guess for anyone listening who’s like, “I want to work the same hours as Sam. I want to reduce my load.” What advice would you give them to move in that direction?

Sam:  Figure out the kind of deliverables and services you want to provide that number one you can provide in a high-quality way, like something you’re good at or something you’ve had experience with the least amount of time involved. Everything takes time, you can’t escape it. Just walking down the street takes time and opening up your computer and typing emails takes time.

So, you can’t avoid not spending time but what you want to find is where can you spend the least amount of time with the highest leverage. I figured out a set of services that I provide and that I’ve had my team try when I had a team. So I sold my agency a while back. But when I had an agency and even now as I do random projects, I know what I’m good at, I know what I can spend the least amount of time on delivering that’s still high quality.

The sooner you can get to that point where you know, you have a core set of services you provide that takes the least amount of time that have the highest leverage in terms of impact and also revenue generated for yourself, the better. The only way to get there, I think is just to do the work. It’s impossible to know when you’re starting off. Unfortunately and fortunately, I think you have to go through that process of figuring that out.

Kira:  Yeah. Maybe that leads to another takeaway from Jacob is he mentioned letting go of things. At least that really resonated with me and I may be taking this in a different context. But I like that question of what could you let go of. What can we… In order to evolve as business owners and as humans, we need to let go of things. It’s really hard to let go in our businesses and our personal lives.

But it feels nearly impossible to reach the next destination unless we start to sacrifice something and sometimes it’s something great that we could let go of and everything feels easier. But sometimes it’s things that we don’t want to let go of. Maybe even control. Have you experienced that, Sam, as you’ve grown your agency and then sold the agency, you’ve done a lot of letting go. How has that showed up in your business?

Sam:  Yeah. I learned the hard way, the things that I didn’t want to do. One of the things I didn’t want to do, once I grew my agency to a certain size, I realized that the only way forward for me unless I made changes was to become essentially a dashboard manager and to just either manage people or processes or both. I had to step away from the copywriting and creative part of that agency deliverables. I didn’t want to do that. So I decided to let go of the things that I just didn’t find enjoyment in, because if I could do it, I could be the dashboard manager, but I would have made a pretty awful dashboard manager and it just wouldn’t be something that I would have enjoyed and it would have been…

Me doing it would have resulted in just catastrophe. You have to make that choice. It’s easy to hold on to things. But if you know there are things that… One decision matrix that I use to know what to let go of are things… Is knowing what I can do, but that someone else can do better and what I can do that no one else can do better. And so making that choice then became came down to, even if I could be the dashboard manager, do I really want to do it and is there someone who can do it better than me. No, I didn’t want to do it. Yes, there are plenty of people who can do that work better than me. I use that for all kinds of decision making. Even if there are things that you could do, if there is someone who can do it better than you, then you need to let go of it.

Kira:  Yeah, I like that. I know we talked a lot about maintaining the pipeline and working on the pipeline. How have you done that, especially with your business today, where you’re working with bigger projects and more long-term clients. How are you thinking about your pipeline?

Sam:  Network. Most of or almost all of my work, either alone or with my agency was through referrals. I set up a very specific referral network for myself and for my agency where people had to be referred to us and had to jump through some hoops to be able to work with us. Like I said, I think nine years or something, almost 10 years, I think. Well, nine probably-

Kira:  You’ve got to celebrate, Sam.

Sam:  I know, right?

Kira:  A 10-year anniversary is coming up.

Sam:  I should. But over the time, once you’ve been in business long enough, it doesn’t have to be for 10 years, it could be a year or two years. If you don’t have a network of people that you know, either other copywriters or other businesses that you’ve done work with or companies that you want to do work with, you have to keep feeding into that network and create that network.

Even if it’s just a handful of people. Whether it’s a handful people or a hundred people, build it over time because through that is how I’ve been able to keep doing work. I haven’t had to chase work in years now. And that’s mainly because of my network. It’s whether you’re new to this or you’re a few years into it, just keep feeding that network, keep making connections and not for the sake of asking for business, but keep in touch with people. That’s what I did. I kept in touch with people, I sent them emails, I’ve stayed in touch with them, I met them at conferences and just kept up the relationship. And then over time, that turns into a project.

Kira:  Okay, so if someone listening has struggled or maybe just not focused on the network and building out their pipeline, what would be one step? Would it just be to send have a schedule where you actually send follow up emails to your past clients and your contacts or something else?

Sam:  Yeah. One of the things I’d done is to just be more organized around it. I used a spreadsheet for the longest time. There are probably software or apps you can use now that help you keep in touch with your network. But I just made sure that every month, I had a touch point with them, whether that was a message on social media or an email that went out or sometimes a phone call or I knew that they would go to a conference, and I made sure that if I was at the same conference, I would just go and find them and speak with them.

It’s important to also make sure that when you do contact them, you’re not doing so with an agenda of trying to get a project. I didn’t keep in touch with them and I always ask for a referral. I never asked for a referral. I just kept in touch and shared things that I learned. So people in the SaaS world, for example, when I was active in that world, I knew that from projects I had worked on, I learned things about SaaS customer acquisition that I’d then happily shared with them in an email. When I reached out to them, I gave them something of value like, “Hey Bob, I ran these experiments a couple of weeks ago. Here’s what we learned. Your company might benefit from doing the same thing.”

I would always share with them things that I learned or things I thought could be useful for them as opposed to reaching out and sounding like a beggar asking for work.

Kira:  Yeah. Something Jacob said in the conversation was make it easy for your network to know what you do and who you help. It’s really, in some ways that simple, especially when you’re getting started just to make it really simple. Don’t confuse people so they’re trying to figure out what you do or how they can help you. Even the most well-intentioned person, if they don’t understand what you do, it’s impossible for them to help you.

That’s something that we can all do, especially when you’re getting started. Before we start to wrap and jump back into the conversation, I know we talked to Jacob about making six figures and he grew fast. Not everyone grows that fast. There could be someone listening who’s like, “I would love to hit six figures but that just feels impossible.” Sam, do you have any, I don’t know, your perspective on how to maintain a goal like that or hit a goal like that, how to work towards it if it’s something you want but it does feel like it’s out of reach and you’ll never get there?

Sam:  Remove the emotion from it or at least that’s what I did. When I had that goal of hitting 100K and then eventually that became more 250 and 500 and so on, I just removed the emotion out of it where hitting it or not hitting it was not a reflection of my self-worth or identity or value as a person. Whether I hit it or not, it wouldn’t become an emotional payoff for me. It would just be a goal that I… In a similar way, I reverse engineered it in terms of figuring out how much money that was every single month and how many of what services did I need to sell to hit that, and then working backwards to figure out how many then if I need to sell X number of services this month to hit the goal, then how many people do I need to speak with and if I need to speak with 10 people, 20 people, what do I have to do to get those conversations started.

It comes down to math and it comes down to mapping it out so you know each step of the way, what you need to do and like I said, for me, the biggest thing was removing the emotion out of it. When