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In the context of business, the word change is like strategy, transformation, or enablement – it’s unclear what it means because of overuse.

Yet change is a useful business concept. It applies when a business inspires and leads a behavioral and mindset transformation.

As an expertise firm, if you’re not changing how your customers do things, you’re optimizing.

An SEO strategist might change how their clients approach market research and content marketing. This might lead to fundamental business process changes, especially when coupled with insights into business operations.

Meanwhile, an SEO specialist might merely optimize what the same business already does in terms of content marketing. No change in how the business runs, just better results.

Both change and optimization create value – more profit, impact, visibility. Both can be part of viable business models.

That said, the change approach is likely to create long-term value and more total value. And for a services-business, it’s more profitable on a per-client basis.

This is just as true of product-focused businesses. We think of products as being optimization-based and not transformational. Software = faster than “humanware”.

But Basecamp didn’t just make project planning faster than with MS Project, it altered the way lean, multi-organization teams approached project management; responsibility became more distributed.

CRM software like Salesforce and Blackbaud was also more than simply a speed and efficiency tool. Its mere presence led some organizations to integrate sales, support, fundraising, and marketing. A fundamental business change.

Whether you sell services, products, or – best option – a combination thereof, you are probably in the change business. 

You complained once, “I tried to tell my client that this will only work if they change the way they do things!”

If so, you have my sympathy. But that’s not an effective approach. Better is to define in advance the kind of change you will create. 

Here’s a simple, 4-part framework to get you started. This will help you define yourself as a change business.

1. What type of person is the change for?
2. What’s the inciting incident(s) that leads them towards change?
3. What is the outcome of the change?
4. How is that change achieved?

I’m curious to hear how you answer this – feel free to hit reply and send me your answers.

Enjoy this summer week,
Rowan

To a large extent, you’re made of words.

The last two posts were about copywriting – one more note on the subject: your product consists of words, so don’t think copywriting is just for promotion and advertising.

Words aren’t just crucial for your productized services, either, but your productized application design and logic (ie your software). The words comprising an app aren’t the “skin”, they are the product. Words are also the primary component of application logic (software languages rely on words).

The most expensive – and lucrative – web application in history runs on copywriting. (Facebook). If professionals didn’t craft Facebook’s copy, shareholders would lose money. I know, you may scorn Facebook – but it could be a lot worse.

Why don’t you just hire a copywriter? 

Well, you should probably hire a copywriter from time to time. But you should write for yourself. But the more adept you are at writing copy:

• the more value you get out of hiring a professional
• the better you’ll understand what you think/believe

I’m pretty sure that every owner of a nice B2B business must become a competent copywriter. Not level Ben Settles-level but good enough to write three things:

• Your bio on your business website
• Your LinkedIn bio
• Your pivotal home page copy

Take action. The good news is you already have all three in place, so you don’t have to start from scratch – you just have to edit. Your minimum viable product here is the three core elements of your LinkedIn

• Your title
• Your description
• Your bio

Hire a copywriter to get you to version 1 if you don’t feel confident, but thereafter, revise it yourself several times a week. Revise, let it sit a few days, repeat. Eventually, you’ll graduate to once-per quarter revisions. For how long? Permanently.

My best
Rowan

Once the owner of a traditional restaurant in Spain asked me to re-translate his menu from Spanish to English. Probably because when he handed it to me, I had to laugh. On offer were “ham dust” and “roasted ham”.

“Oh, you’re gonna laugh? Then you translate it!” Ok, fair enough!

These were innocent mistakes – Google Translate says that “Pernil Asado” is “roasted ham”.

But Pernil Asado isn’t what we call ham. It’s a crispy, juicy, spit-roasted pork shoulder that’s been overnight-marinated in an aioli, spices rubbed into skin, slow-cooked to peel-off-the-bone tenderness, then flame-roasted for texture. It tests the resolve of a half-hearted vegetarian (and disgusts a full-hearted one). 

But “pork roast” wouldn’t have done it justice either, so I settled for “roasted pork shoulder”.

Translation is at best an echo
George Borrow

Here’s the thing – translation is a form of writing or, in this case, a form of copywriting.

But what is a translation, really? It’s a rendering or a conversion of one thing to another. 

Your challenge is to render your expertise. You normally talk about it in maxims or sayings – about user experience, or software implementation, features, conversions, or some other benefit. You speak in lists and repeat observations that resonate and bring energy to conversations.

Or you might not really put your expertise into words at all – you just do things expertly and make your clients really happy. Those clients get it; they work with you for months and it becomes obvious to them you’re really good at what you do.

But what about the rest of us? For our benefit, you need to do translation work. Or copywriting or whatever word you want to use.

All best,
Rowan

Imagine that someone offered you these secrets:

1. A secret way of marketing (used by everyone from William Randolph Hearst and Steve Jobs to Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump…) that can potentially make people feel stupid for even considering buying from your competition.
2. A popular standup comedian’s secret I routinely used late at night in my old Facebook group to generate hundreds of rabidly engaged member comments by morning.
3. The God Emperor’s secret trick for sucking up all the attention, engagement, & money you want out of your market.
4. A talentless A-list actor’s secret for having an influential brand that works like gangbusters even if you don’t deserve it!
5. The secret to how Trump (pre-presidency and now during his presidency) gets the media to hand him millions in free exposure & engagement whenever he wanted it.

Do you want to know the secrets? You can know them all, courtesy of notorious copywriter Ben Settle. For a $100/month.

I’m not gonna lie, I want to know these secrets even though… I already know them. I want to know because Ben is a real copywriter. Which is because he publishes not every day, but multiple times every day – and has done so for years.

Even his email subjects hint at secrets.

But here’s the thing:

If you think people are paying for your secrets, you’re crazy
–Seth Godin

That is to say, the secrets Ben reveals aren’t really secrets. Sure, not everyone knows them or thinks about them. But he wasn’t the first to identify them.

They’re all discussed in academic detail in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. And 2000+ years before that book was published, they were discussed in detail in ancient Greece or Rome. 

That’s why people aren’t paying for your so-called secrets. That’s also why you should give away everything you know – if you do so artfully. Because they’re paying you for how you tell the old secrets. For how you apply old ideas to new problems. 

My best,
Rowan

Someone just asked me:

Why do you pick up a book? And why do you reach for that book in particular? What are books for?

I pick them up:

• to be entertained
• learn about people
• to learn about places or history
• to learn about business
• to get lost in a story
• to pass the time
• to get an edge
• to learn about the author

You might have similar motivations?

What if we could provide our ideal clients with entertainment, insight into people, insight into business, engaging stories, some advantage or headstart in their business, and let them know something about ourselves, the business owners?

This is the only way you control to create trust outside of the constraints of a 1-to-1 relationship. Trust is a lot more expensive to create than website traffic, but like anything rare, it’s valuable and worth the cost.

That cost is your discipline, time, and emotional labor. 

And yes, you promote the content you create. Don’t rely on the uneven landscape of social media and your personal and professional connections. Use advertising, SEO, and outreach marketing to prime the pump.

But first, you have to do make something. If it’s scary and a massive pain in the ass, you might be on the right track.

The good news is that you don’t have to write a book – you just have to write.

Have a lovely week ahead,
Rowan

Neil Gaiman is one of those writers who win all the awards – Hugo, Nebula, Newbury, and more. So he’s written a lot of books. But if you’re like me and his name rings a bell, it’s because he wrote one of the first massively popular graphic novels, a series called The Sandman. Gaiman offers us a framework for how to benefit from criticism:

Remember: when someone tells you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right.

When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong – and how to fix – they are almost always wrong.

This truth is why a good business consultant will quickly identify problems – yet be slow to offer unilateral solutions. It’s always why client-led solutions work best.

Neil Gaiman isn’t the writer I quoted yesterday, but his framework applies to the book I quoted: The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels.

(Congratulations if you guessed right!!)

Twenty-nine year old Karl Marx understood what was wrong with industrial capitalism: wage-labor tries to turn human beings into machine parts, with repulsive results. He was right about what was wrong.

But his and Frederick Engels’ fixes were (with a few notable exceptions) absurd to the point of scandalous (eg. abolishing families). Maybe Marx would have been appalled by the murder-state that was Soviet Russia, but whether he realized it or not, his policies required totalitarianism.

One takeaway here is that any criticism has a diamond-in-the-rough value; you have to chip away the “how to fix” parts but listen for the “this seems wrong parts”.

Here’s the more specific takeaway that even Karl Marx would agree with: there are many ways to monetize the value of your expertise, but billing by the hour isn’t one of them. It just seems wrong to me.

My best,
Rowan

I read an ebook-length document over the weekend on productizing services. It asserts that the powers-that-be have:

“…stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.”

This hits home to me because I view many of you as “poets”, figuratively, in that you possess verbal powers of imagination and expression. That quality is required of us as independent business owners, whether of a company of one (“which doesn’t mean you’re literally a 1-person business”) or a company of 100.

At a minimum, for example, every one of you should be able to write decent web copy for your home page and your about page, including your own bio. And most of you can. 

Many of you are also persons of science, especially those of you in software making or consulting. But even if your business is to one side of technology – creative, professional services – we all have to achieve some mastery of technology.

Open Source entrepreneur Dries Buytaert recently wrote that after 20 years, he still writes CSS code. (CSS helps make web content look better.) This from a guy who soon after writing that blog post sold his startup for 1 billion. 

You don’t necessarily have to learn CSS (like Ben Franklin did, kind of), but like a  digital-age Renaissance polyglot, you need a broad skillset. One of the core skills is learning to exchange value for money without reducing yourself to a wage earner. In other words, how not to bill hourly. So that you’re not a commodity.

In the same document cited above, I found what we might call the Hourly Billing Repulsiveness principle:

as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases

But also, more importantly:

the cost of production of a workman is restricted almost entirely to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance

The market wants to pay you just enough to keep you alive, so you can keep producing.

Counterpoint: realistically good people want to pay more. And an expert can make a good living billing hourly for services – or selling services hourly on top of product fees. Many of us have seen this happen.

Even so, can you make what you’re worth? Unlikely – a knowledge worker’s abilities and expertise multiply at least 10x between the age of 25 and 45. But how many go from charging $60/hr to $/600hr?

In the next episode, I’ll reveal the book and its authors! In the meantime, any guesses?

Have a wonderful week ahead,
Rowan

A puzzling question from a famous author that most of you know: “how do you be pleasantly surprised?”

When someone presents you with mostly old but partly new information (a common formula), you can be surprised or be not surprised.

It’s a choice.

Don’t be the person that responds to partially familiar and partially novel ideas, questions, and facts with: “Meh, I already knew 50% of that – I’m not surprised”. 

Instead, think: “Ah, I didn’t know 1% of that! I’m surprised!”

Some assume that projecting expertise precludes being surprised. So they dismiss almost anything new. As if to shrug and say, “Ok, I pretty much know what you’re saying; there’s a new little detail in that question, but I’ve never considered so it must be unimportant”. 

That’s the ego speaking.

This is one of the reasons that software sucks – the entrepreneur fails to be surprised at new pieces of information brought to her by customers, her engineers, her designers.

The posture of hard-to-surprise also poisons your sales and marketing. If you host a webinar, conduct a product demo, or run a sales consultation, and you are not pleasantly surprised, at least once, you’re missing an opportunity.

To become a skilled marketer, be surprisable.

Start with the details

If your reaction to a seemingly detail-oriented question is to dismiss’n’scold (“now now, we mustn’t obsess over details”) that doesn’t make you seem big-picture. It makes you seem lacking in curiosity – because you are.

Mies van der Rohe said God is in the details, so how do you know that surprising insight isn’t trapped into the margins, the folder structure, or the spacing between your logo and your tagline?

“Cultivating surprise is an essential part of what it means to be a writer in this world, or at least a writer of ideas”
– Malcolm Gladwell

My best,
Rowan

PS. I’m taking today off for Juneteenth but this newsletter is a labour of love, not work

The point of the monster emoji email was that content marketing can consist of insight that’s valuable to your audience but also of content that’s helpful.

For every recent year of hard work under your belt, you have about 20 useful “How To” articles. The farther back you go, that number shrinks, but you still have a good 50 to 100 useful, short “How-To” blog posts in you.

Before you get started, a tip – forget about SEO. For now.

Instead, just focus on creating something helpful to a specific type of person in 280 words or less (this will also fit into a LinkedIn update).

How to do so? Start by answering these 6 questions:

1. How do you want your blog post to serve your readers? What will they get out of it? 
2. Imagine it’s three months after your blog post was published, and we’re looking back on the results together. What’s the blog post done for you that made the effort worthwhile?
3. Who Is your primary audience for this post? 
4. Describe a typical person in your primary audience. Give them a name, describe them as if you’d describe any real person you know. Who are they, what do they do, where are they in their relationship with you and your company?
5. What doubt is this person experiencing because they’ve not read your blog post?
6. What transformation will this person get in their work because they read and implement your blog post?

The rest is easy once you answer #1 – and one approach to it is to create a step-by-step roadmap. Like this post. Also consider: even the most complex and important 6-figure business decisions can be reduced down to a 5 or 6 step list.

This has been a hell of a year; it’s OK to keep it simple.

Best,
Rowan